Making Chaucer's Book of the Duchess

Making Chaucers Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception is the first comprehensive book-length study of Chaucers earliest major narrative poem and its reception. It provides a rigorous and critically balanced assimilation of the Book of the Duchess, the story of its reception and dissemination, and the major trends in its interpretive history into the fabric of twenty-first century Chaucer studies. Focusing on the construction and value of the Book of the Duchess as a book, this study explores Chaucers concern with acts of writing and the textual mediation of experience. At the same time, it contextualises Chaucers poem within his eras broader concerns with authority, reading practices, and the vernacular. By yoking issues of creative and scholarly reception with those of book production and materiality, Jamie C. Fumos study innovatively highlights acts of collaboration stemming from the poems status as a textual, imaginative act.