Something from Nothing:: Melancholy, Gossip, and Chaucer's Poetics of Idling in the Book

of the Duchess
Author(s): Adin Esther Lears
Source: The Chaucer Review , Vol. 48, No. 2 (2013), pp. 205-221
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/chaucerrev.48.2.0205

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 Something from Nothing: Melancholy,
Gossip, and Chaucer’s Poetics of Idling
in the Book of the Duchess
adin esther lears

At the opening of Chaucer’s early dream vision, the Book of the Duchess, the
narrator describes his insomnia and his general idle malaise:

I have so many an ydel thoght

Purely for defaute of slep
That, by my trouthe, I take no kep
Of nothing, how hyt cometh or gooth,
Ne me nys nothyng leef nor looth.
All is ylyche good to me—
Joye or sorowe, wherso hyt be—
For I have felyng in nothyng.
(4–11)1

The relentless negations in these lines—denials of action, thought, being,

and feeling—emphasize the narrator’s lack of productive intellectual or
social influence and his emotional void. Yet “nothing” takes on an allegori-
cal force as it “cometh or gooth” and as the narrator describes his “felyng
in nothyng.” This allegory illogically suggests that the Dreamer finds some-
thing—a ­feeling—in nothing, a paradoxical notion that anticipates a deep

I would like to thank Nicholas Salvato and Samantha Zacher for their input on this article. I am
especially grateful to Masha Raskolnikov and Andrew Galloway as well as the anonymous readers
from The Chaucer Review for their careful readings and invaluable insights.
1. All quotations of Chaucer’s works are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn.
(Boston, 1987).

the chaucer review, vol. 48, no. 2, 2013.

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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206 The Chaucer Review

preoccupation throughout the poem with a making something from n ­ othing,

valuing passive as active, and finding productivity in idleness. 2

Idleness is an important though little-studied aspect of medieval

culture, as James Simpson has argued.3 Simpson articulates a literary prin-
ciple of “idling” based on the repeated echoing of prior sources. In doing
so, he suggests, a poem “enacts yet somehow resists the possibility of liter-
ary waste; it recycles even as it appears to waste.”4 In her book on medieval
gossip, Susan Phillips takes up the issue of idleness much more extensively,
making a case for the productive capacity of idle talk.5 Like both of these
scholars, I am interested in idleness and its productive potential. I will
integrate and expand on their work by approaching the subject of idle-
ness with a particular focus on gender and sexuality. In doing so, I hope
to illuminate a queer dimension to the notion of productive idleness by
articulating a poetics of idling in Chaucer’s first dream vision.
The apparent passivity of the melancholic narrator has been a focus
for many scholarly treatments of the poem influenced by queer theory and
gender studies.6 Most notably, for my purposes, Steven Kruger argues that
the Dreamer’s melancholia at the beginning of the poem works as a queer-
ing force, rendering him passive and effeminate. Kruger further suggests
that it is through the Dreamer’s homosocial interaction with the Black

2. It has been well established that BD, 1–15, are closely modeled on lines 1–12 of Jean
Froissart’s poem Paradys d’amours (Colin Wilcockson, notes to BD, in Riverside, 966–76, at
966). Chaucer’s version seems to diverge from Froissart’s opening lines in its emphasis on nega-
tion. Froissart’s negations are limited to only three instances of the word “ne” while Chaucer’s
nine negations range from “ne” to “nought” to “nothing,” among others. Despite this difference,
Froissart’s lines hint at a similar potential productivity to the narrator’s wakeful creative block.
After expressing his disbelief that he is still alive despite his melancholic wakefulness, Froissart’s
narrator explains, “Car bien sachiés que par vellier/Me viennent souvent travaillier/Pensés et
merancolies” (For it is well known that, by staying awake, thoughts and melancholy cause me to
labor painfully; Jean Froissart, Le Paradis D’Amour L’Orloge Amoureus, ed. Peter F. Dembowski
[Geneva, 1986], 40 [lines 5–7]).The verb “travaillier” is particularly interesting because of its
dual connotations in Middle French. It can convey a tortured endurance, suffering, or a fight to
save one’s own life—no doubt the primary meaning here. Yet it was also used to denote the pains
of labor in childbirth. These meanings suggest a kind of nascent intellectual productivity to the
pain of wakeful melancholy.
3. James Simpson, “The Economy of Involucrum: Idleness in Reason and Sensuality,” in Andrew
Galloway and R. F. Yeager, eds., Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions
in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honor of Winthrop Wetherbee (Toronto, 2009),
390–412.
4. Simpson, “The Economy,” 391.
5. Susan Phillips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England
(University Park, Pa., 2007), 3.
6. See, for example, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley, 1992);
and Susan Schibanoff, Chaucer’s Queer Poetics: Rereading the Dream Trio (Toronto, 2006).

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 adin esther lears 207

Knight within his dream that his melancholic state is corrected.7 While
such ­treatments of the poem are valuable, I wonder why we must locate
the poem’s queer dynamic within a gender inversion, insisting on the equa-
tion of a male character’s “passivity” with “femininity.” I would like to
move beyond this correlation by suggesting that neither “femininity” nor
“queerness” must be passive. The Dreamer and the Black Knight mobilize
their unproductive physical and mental states—their idleness—toward
emotional and creative production. Instead of “being idle,” they are “idling.”
This active participial form inscribes a measure of activity into the apparent
stagnancy of their idleness.
The Book of the Duchess emphasizes idleness at three levels. First, Chaucer
thematizes it by highlighting how the Dreamer’s m ­ elancholia prevents him
from writing poetry, rendering his languor akin to a particularly ­humanist
brand of melancholy: accedia, or intellectual and creative torpor. Yet at the end
of the poem, as the Dreamer returns to his pen, prompted by his ­marvelous
dream, the melancholic state that has produced his dream is ­reinscribed as
productive. In the figure of the Black Knight, the Dreamer’s idleness is extended
and magnified, as the Knight’s despair at the loss of his wife approaches a
kind of spiritual sloth, or acedia. The Dreamer’s ­intervention into the Black
Knight’s melancholy introduces another idle mode in the poem—one that
emerges at the level of narrative and discourse. As R. A. Shoaf has demon-
strated, the Dreamer acts as a kind of secular confessor to the Black Knight,
probing him about his dead lover in a strategy that resembles the questions
of a priest taking confession.8 However, several scholars have pointed out
that the intimate personal detail required for confession renders it danger-
ously close to that most maligned form of “idle talk”—gossip.9 At the same
time that the Dreamer acts as a secular confessor to the Black Knight, their
conversation also resembles gossip. Yet their idle talk is not passive or unpro-
ductive. The confessional, gabby, discursive resonances of the men’s verbal
exchange elevate the intimacy between the Dreamer and the Black Knight,
allowing for the partial consolation of an intimate or queer friendship. This
dynamic undermines Kruger’s point that their homosocial interaction acts

7. Steven Kruger, “Medical and Moral Authority in the Late Medieval Dream,” in Peter Brown,
ed., Reading Dreams: Interpreting Dreams From Chaucer to Shakespeare (Oxford, 1999), 51–83.
8. R. A. Shoaf,“‘Mutatio Amoris’: ‘Penitentia’ and the Form of The Book of the Duchess,” Genre 14
(1981): 163–89.
9. Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia, 1999). See also
Phillips, Transforming Talk.

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208 The Chaucer Review

as a corrective force.10 Finally, Chaucer’s poetics of idling emerges at the level

of poetic form, as the poem ends by rearticulating its own origin. Despite
this regressive movement, which imitates an idle mechanism in its decep-
tive lack of progression or movement forward, the poem gestures outward to
Chaucer’s future poetic corpus in a way that renders the poem’s idle circular
structure an active force.
The Book of the Duchess offers an early example in an English literary
tradition of texts that depict men being idle in an intimate or homoerotic
way.11 Such an association highlights the lack of social productivity—
and biological reproductivity—in queer relationships, a point that has
recently become the focus of a particular strand of queer theory espoused
by Lee Edelman and others, known as the “antisocial thesis.”12 Edelman
points to the violence of “reproductive futurism,” that is, the social and
political emphasis on reproduction, the child, and the future.13 In making
this important claim, Edelman nihilistically identifies the “death drive”
as a queer imperative. In contrast, I would like to show how the queer

10. By invoking “queer friendship” here, I do not mean to imply a sexual relationship
between the Dreamer and the Black Knight, nor do I wish to place them within the kind of
lineage of gay history undertaken by scholars such as John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance,
and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the
Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980). Rather, I mean here to emphasize the erotic, and even more
the intimate, as separate from the sexual, but nevertheless still distinct from a strictly platonic rela-
tionship between men. In other words, on a continuum of sexuality, “queer friendship” lies some-
where in between same-sex friendship and same-sex romantic love that is consummated physically.
In making this distinction, I am guided by the work of Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship,
Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, 2007). For more on the homosocial and the
homoerotic between men in the Middle Ages, see Richard Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and Chivalry:
Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century (New York, 2003).
11. Though it is beyond the scope of this article to explore this claim in depth, it is worth pointing
out how idle dialogue and the homoerotic go hand in hand in later English literature. Consider,
for example, the languid and intimate conversation between men in Charles Dickens and Wilkie
Collins’s short story “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices,” or Oscar Wilde’s “remarks upon the
importance of doing nothing” and “remarks upon the importance of discussing everything” in
his critical dialogue “The Critic as Artist,” in which two men discuss the nature of art and beauty
with seductive and sensual language. See Charles Dickens, Reprinted Pieces and The Lazy Tour of
Two Idle Apprentices (New York, 1896), 309–408; and Richard Ellmann, ed., The Artist as Critic:
Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (New York, 1968), 341–408. For more on queer idling in a modern
context, see Mark W. Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London
(London, 2003). I am indebted to Nicholas Salvato for pointing to the homosocial tenor of idling in
later literature.
12. For more on the importance of the “antisocial thesis” to queer theory, see Janet Halley
and Andrew Parker, “Introduction,” in Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, eds., After Sex: On Writing
Since Queer Theory (Durham, N.C., 2011) 1–14, at 9–11.
13. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C., 2004), 3 and
passim.

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 adin esther lears 209

friendship in the Book of the Duchess is invested, in its emotional and

poetic productivity, in the future. My reading renders queer idleness
an active, productive force, and so aligns with queer theorists like Eve
Sedgwick, who sees queer as “a continuing moment, movement, motive—
recurrent, eddying, troublant.”14 The Book of the Duchess is doubly queer
as the intimacy cultivated between men is heightened and as the poem
renders idleness into idling—an irrepressible cycle of production.
The Book of the Duchess’s focus on illness and grief highlights both
the Dreamer’s and the Black Knight’s idle or unproductive conditions
and enables their conversation to function as recuperative idle talk. The
Dreamer’s complicated gender is evident from the outset of the poem, as
are the physical and spiritual conditions that inform his dream. Chaucer’s
narrator emphasizes the Dreamer’s physical and psychological infirmity,
telling us, “I may nat slepe wel nygh noght;/I have so many an ydel thoght”
(3–4). He stresses his overactive imagination, asserting that his dazed
languor is a result of “sorwful ymagynacioun” (14) and specifying that he
suffers from “melancolye” (23). Moreover, the narrator’s illness renders him
“a mased thyng” (12), passive and impotent. The narrator tells us that his
sickness and insomnia are “agaynes kynde” (16), a phrase that, as Kruger
points out, would strongly resonate with moralizing rhetoric focused on
sexual behavior contra naturam.15
The nuance contained in the notion of the “ydel thoghts” that the Dreamer
identifies in line 4 is worth examining in greater detail. The word idel and its
variants in Middle English carry associations of laziness, worthlessness, empti-
ness, and lack of productivity.16 The Dreamer’s idle thoughts underscore his
over­active imagination. This emphasis on idleness hints at the nature of the
Dreamer’s melancholic condition. The word suggests that the Dreamer has no
outlet for his lively fantasies. His transgression is not the medieval sin of acedia,
a temptation that incites flight from spiritual exercises and ultimately produces
alienation from God and despair. This spiritual condition emerges later when
the Black Knight’s malady begins to resemble religious despondency. Instead,
the Dreamer’s melancholy bears a likeness to the more broadly philosophical
Petrarchan concept of accidia: the melancholic inhibition of creative production

14. Eve Sedgwick, “Foreword,” in her Tendencies (New York, 1994) xi–xvi, at xii.
15. Kruger, “Medical and Moral Authority,” 77.
16. MED, s.v. idel (adj.).

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210 The Chaucer Review

brought on by despair in the human condition.17 Furthermore, Middle English

notions of idleness shifted semantically between intellectual production and
biological reproduction. In his Confessio Amantis, for example, John Gower uses
the word to refer to fallow land: “And ek the lond is so honeste/That it is plen-
tevous and plein,/Ther is non ydel ground in vein” (7.930–32).18 Though many
of the references to idleness denoting physical reproduction refer to land, the
word’s association with stopped or blocked fertility gives us greater insight into
the nature of the Dreamer’s ailment. Combining with his melancholic physicality,
the Dreamer’s idleness separates him from the imperative norm of production.19
The Black Knight’s depleted vitality echoes that of the Dreamer. Reflecting
the narrator’s assertion that he is “Alway in poynt to falle a-doun” (13), the Black
Knight feels “Hys sorwful hert gan faste faynte” (488). Chaucer zeroes in with
minute precision on the physiology of the Knight’s swoon:

The blood was fled for pure drede

Doun to hys herte, to make hym warm—
For wel hyt feled the herte had harm—
To wite eke why hyt was adrad
By kynde, and for to make hyt glad,
For hyt ys membre principal
Of the body; and that made al
Hys hewe chaunge and wexe grene
And pale, for ther noo blood ys sene
In no maner lym of hys.
(490–99)

17. Medieval understandings of sloth are numerous and varied. Sigfried Wenzel traces the
transformation in attitudes toward sloth or melancholy from a deadly sin in the Middle Ages to a
more valorized “noble vice” in the early modern and romantic periods, noting Petrarch’s crucial
position as a transitional figure between the two attitudes. See Siegfried Wenzel, “Petrarch’s Accidia,”
Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1961): 36–48. He articulates this transition more fully in his book The
Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Durham, N.C., 1967). Though I risk gener-
alizing about the difference between accidia and acedia here, it is not my aim to locate BD within
Wenzel’s genealogy. By invoking the two different forms here, I mean to emphasize the different but
related positions of the Dreamer and the Black Knight, and to suggest an impetus for the Dreamer’s
later adoption of the role of confessor for the Black Knight.
18. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo, 2003–6), 3:285.
19. Chaucer’s descriptions of Alcyone, the lovesick and mournful female figure in the
Dreamer’s book, draw parallels with the Dreamer, underscoring his troublesome gender identity.
Alcyone’s swoons, for example, recall the narrator’s assertion that he is “Alway in poynt to falle
a-doun” (13). More pointedly, she too is a figure with reproductive potential that is wasted by her
grief and lovesickness. Alcyone is, according to the narrator, “The beste that mighte bere lyf ” (64),
an odd allusion to her place within a reproductive economy that seems unrelated to the rest of
her story. This unexpected momentary stress on her wasted (re)productivity highlights her paral-
lelism with the Dreamer. Alcyone and the Dreamer both hold great capacity for generation—his
­intellectual, hers physical—yet the melancholia that the two share renders each sterile.

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 adin esther lears 211

Chaucer’s detailed attention to the internal flux of the Black Knight’s body
reinforces the moist humoral associations accompanying melancholia and
ties his experience to the Dreamer’s.20 His interior currents seem to feed into
his flood of words, as if his “complaynte” (487) were merely another form of
fluid in his body’s fungible economy of humors.21 The precise description of
anatomy recalls Chaucer’s account of the death of Arcite in the Knight’s Tale,
positioning the Black Knight almost at the point of death. Chaucer’s asser-
tion that the Black Knight’s face is “Ful pitous pale and nothyng red” (470)
anticipates an earlier description of the dead body of Seys “That lyeth ful
pale and nothyng rody” (143), increasing the urgency of his predicament. The
Dreamer’s physical infirmity pales—so to speak—in comparison to the Black
Knight’s sickness.
It soon becomes clear that in spiritual terms, too, the Black Knight is
in peril. As we recall Chaucer’s characterization of the Dreamer’s malady as
non-creative humanist melancholia, we may begin to read the Black Knight’s
illness as another form of melancholia—one spiritual rather than intellectual
in nature. While the Dreamer’s melancholia is Petrarchan, the Black Knight’s
malady is more elusive. To be sure, it is easily characterized as lovesickness,
yet other clues provide a more nuanced reading. Though the “compleynt” the
Black Knight utters just before he meets the Dreamer is short and uninspired,
its existence suggests that he does not suffer from stunted creativity in the
way the Dreamer does. Instead, the Black Knight’s grief has reached the point
of despair: he fails to imagine solace from anyone or anything. Without hope,
the Black Knight laments,

“No man may my sorwe glade,

That maketh my hewe to falle and fade,
And hath myn understondynge lorn
That me ys wo that I was born!
May noght make my sorwes slyde,
Nought al the remedyes of Ovide,
Ne Orpheus, god of melodye,

20. For more on the links among sloth, melancholy, and the humors, see Wenzel, The Sin of
Sloth, 191–94 (the appendix “Acedia and the Humors”). These pages document instances through-
out medieval literature where sloth is associated with humors—in particular phlegm, the cold
wet humor. This association is helpful in making the connection between sloth and melancholia
and between melancholia and femininity, which was associated with the cold and wet pole of the
humoral continuum.
21. Thomas Lacqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge,
Mass., 1990). Lacqueur uses the term “fungibility” in describing medieval medical theories of
humoral flux.

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212 The Chaucer Review

Ne Dedalus with his playes slye;

Ne hele me may no phisicien,
Noght Ypocras ne Galyen;
Me ys wo that I lyve houres twelve.”
(563–73)

Reflecting the Dreamer’s negating lament at the poem’s start, the Black Knight’s
list of failed sources for consolation includes ancient authors, mythical figures,
and physicians. Nowhere does he imagine spiritual comfort from God or pasto-
ral care from a priest through the sacrament of confession. In this, the Black
Knight is guilty of acedia. The Dreamer’s cryptic remark to the Black Knight
later in the poem, “Me thynketh ye have such a chaunce/As shryfte wythoute
repentaunce” (1113–14), reflects the latter’s failure to understand the gravity of
his spiritual circumstances. His inability to imagine comfort from God suggests
a refusal of orthodox religiosity. Physically and spiritually, the Black Knight is
in worse condition than the Dreamer. This imbalance requires the Dreamer to
adopt the role of intercessory caretaker, spiritual physician, and confessor for the
Black Knight.22
By introducing confession as a discursive mode, Chaucer engages with
one of the central spiritual concerns of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the prac-
tice of confession rose in influence in the late Middle Ages, beginning in
1215 with the Fourth Lateran Council’s Canon twenty-one, Omnis utriusque
sexus. By the late fourteenth century, the courtly culture of which Chaucer
was a part stressed the fundamental importance of personal confession.23
Further, the practice and discourse of confession powerfully influenced
both the structure and content of late medieval vernacular literature in
works by Chaucer and his contemporaries.24
As Shoaf has demonstrated, the Dreamer’s questioning of the Black
Knight illustrates the circumstantiae peccati model of confessional question-
ing. This model is concerned with eliciting a broad picture of the circumstances
surrounding a sin so that the penitent might achieve a more thorough confes-
sion. The seven interrogatives designed to promote the more perfect confession

22. In BD Chaucer primarily deploys confession as a mode of speech between the Dreamer
and the Black Knight. In doing so, he endows an unlikely figure—the Dreamer—with unauthorized
power. This reading complicates the widespread scholarly tendency to dismiss Chaucer’s Dreamer
as dull-witted and almost willfully obtuse with respect to the Black Knight’s delicate discussion of
his dead lady. See Shoaf, “Mutatio Amoris,” 176; and Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer:
A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1992), 86.
23. Jeremy Catto, “Religion and the English Nobility in the Later Fourteenth Century,” in
Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden, eds., History and Imagination: Essays in Honor
of H. R. Trevor-Roper (New York, 1982), 43–55.
24. Mary Flowers Braswell, The Medieval Sinner: Characterization and Confession in the
Literature of the English Middle Ages (Rutherford, N.J., 1983).

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 adin esther lears 213

were “Quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quamodo, quando” (who, what, where,
with whose help, why, in what manner, when). After the Black Knight’s diatribe
against Fortune, the Dreamer probes him for more information, saying,

“Good sir, telle me al hooly

In what wyse, how, why, and wherfore
That ye have thus youre blysse lore.”
(746–48)

Though the Black Knight’s monologues dominate the interaction between the
two men, the Dreamer subtly prods the Black Knight for more detail. After
the Black Knight has waxed on for over three hundred lines about his first
encounter with Lady Whyte, the Dreamer gently urges him to continue with
his story, adding more pointed and probing questions in order to achieve a
more complete confession:

“Ye han wel told me herebefore;

Hyt ys no need to reherse it more,
How ye sawe hir first, and where.
But wolde ye tel me the manere
To hire which was your firste speche—
Therof I wolde yow beseche—
And how she knewe first your thoght,
Whether ye loved hir or noght?”
(1127–34; emphasis added)

The Dreamer’s command to the Black Knight—“telle me alle” (1143)—

demonstrates one facet of a confessional rhetorical model underlying the
discourse between them.
Extending this confessional model, the Dreamer fashions himself a
healer of the Black Knight’s bruised soul. The concept of confession as
psycho-somatic “cure” for sin was commonplace after the Fourth Lateran
Council, and certainly was known by Chaucer’s contemporaries.25 As spiritual

25. Henry of Lancaster, the first duke of Lancaster as well as prominent diplomat and army
leader during the Hundred Years’ War, wrote a small volume on confession called the Livre de seyntz
medecines (The Book of Holy Medicine). The Livre consists of a series of confessions in the form of
a prayer. Fashioned meticulously around the symbol indicated by the title, the Livre describes the
penitent whose sins are like mortal wounds, and his quest for the help of the divine Physician
through the “cure” of confession. Lancaster, who died of the plague in March 1361, was the father
of Blanche of Lancaster, whose death BD ostensibly commemorates. The Livre would have been
a fitting influence for a poem in honor of Blanche. See Henry of Lancaster, Le Livre de seyntz
­medecines: The Unpublished Devotional Treatise, ed. Emile-Jules-François Arnould (Oxford, 1940).

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214 The Chaucer Review

­ hysician, the confessor’s responsibility was to heal the sinner’s soul rather
p
than expose the sickness and punish the sinner.26 The Book of the Duchess
invokes the confessor-physician in a suggestive manner. After apologizing for
interrupting the Black Knight’s solitude, the Dreamer invites the Knight to
speak at greater length about his sorrows, saying,

“Me thynketh in gret sorowe I yow see;

But certes, sire, yif that yee
Wolde ought discure me youre woo,
I wolde, as wys God helpe me soo,
Amende hyt, yif I kan or may.
Ye mowe preve hyt be assay;
For, by my trouthe, to make yow hool
I wol do al my power hool.”
(547–54)

Chaucer’s rime riche with the word hool in variant modes—adjectivally as

“healthy” to describe the Black Knight in recovery, adverbially as “wholly” to
describe the strength of the Dreamer’s intended action—links the two men
from the outset in intimate association with each other.
The confessional undertones between the Dreamer and the Black Knight
underscore the intimacy of their bond. Although systems of private penance
existed throughout most of Europe from the sixth century onward, in Karma
Lochrie’s words, the Fourth Lateran Council “constellate[d] the act [of confes-
sion] around the notion of secrecy.”27 This secrecy reinforced the intimacy
forged between confessor and sinner. Indeed, as Michel Foucault argues, the
“scientia sexualis” created in modern technologies of confession was a form
of ars erotica. In his words:

We have . . . invented a different kind of pleasure: pleasure in the

truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing that truth, of discover-
ing and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of
captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret,
of luring it out in the open—the specific pleasure of the true dis-
course on pleasure.28

26. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 26.

27. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 27.
28. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (New York, 1990), 71.

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 adin esther lears 215

Foucault’s definition has the effect of characterizing the Middle Ages as a time
of free and natural sexual expression, “before confessional discourse had its
way with sex.”29 Yet as we have seen, confession was a well-established prac-
tice in Chaucer’s time. Foucault’s observations on the pleasures of confession
are equally applicable to the confessional discourse in the Book of the Duchess.
Indeed, the poem invites us to extend Foucault’s point as it reminds us of
the continuity between the roles of confessor and lover as two kinds of meta-
phorical healer. The trope of the beloved lady as physician for the lovesick lover
was fairly commonplace in the medieval rhetoric of courtly love, as the Black
Knight demonstrates when he refers to Whyte as “my lyves leche” (920). The
slippage between tropes—pastoral-physician and beloved-physician—points
to a conflation of the two roles, adding a distinctly erotic hint to the Dreamer’s
position as confessor. By characterizing himself as a healer, the Dreamer
attempts to erase the Black Knight’s perception of his mistress and love as
physician, and to deposit himself in her place, inhabiting a position charged
with erotic undercurrents. This reading reinforces the queer valences of his
friendship with the Black Knight, complicating Kruger’s argument that the
Dreamer undergoes a physical and moral correction as a result of his dream
vision. The confessional associations in the men’s conversation highlight and
deepen the intimacy forged between them.
At the same time, the level of intimate emotional detail achieved in the
Black Knight’s confession is suggestive of another mechanism of communi-
cation, one that also works to fortify their queer friendship: namely, gossip.
As I am suggesting here, along with several scholars, confession and gossip
are related. Both modes of discourse are irrepressible, spilling outward and
spreading, even as they insist on containment and secrecy.30 A fine line exists
between authorized and unauthorized speech; each may slip easily and
dangerously into the other. As Phillips demonstrates, the detailed peniten-
tial narratives demanded of parishioners in their confessions are remarkably
similar to idle talk. Like the confessor and the lover, the gossip or “sibling
in God” was figured as a healer capable of spiritual and emotional solace.31
But there was a key difference. Confession was a practice sanctioned by all
manner of social and political authorities in the Middle Ages. Gossip was not.

29. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 23.

30. Lochrie, Covert Operations.
31. See Phillips, Transforming Talk, 139, for a discussion of this figure in fifteenth-century
Scots poet William Dunbar’s Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. Phillips points to the
correlation between the role of gossip and the role of confessor, but does not note how the notion
of “medicinal” benefit extends to the role of lover as well. This threefold correlation points to a
provocative gap that suggests the potential for homoerotic bonds between gossips.

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216 The Chaucer Review

At a crucial moment near the end of his lament for Whyte, the Black
Knight seems to express self-consciousness about the idle and unproductive
nature of his speech. Asserting his undying love for his lost wife, he says to
the narrator, “Nay, trewly, I gabbe now” (1075). The verb gabben in Middle
English often meant to speak foolishly, deceitfully, or nonsensically, much
like the medieval verbs denoting gossip: janglen, bakbiten, and clateren.32 The
Black Knight’s use of “gabbe” in this context suggests that it is futile to talk of
loving his lady forever because she dead. But the word additionally points to
a latent anxiety on his part that his prolonged monologues and interaction
with the Dreamer is unmasculine or unorthodox in other ways. Despite this
anxiety, the Black Knight continues talking for over two hundred more lines.
The prolongation of his speech suggests that the Black Knight discounts his
anxiety and embraces idle talk.
The sociolinguistic particulars of their interaction reinforce the inti-
macy and queer valence of the dialogue between the Dreamer and the Black
Knight. Their conversation resonates with the gossipy modes of “bitching”
and “chatting,” according to the categories delineated by Deborah Jones.33
Jones defines bitching as cathartic complaint about any dissatisfaction in a
woman’s life. Prompted by the Dreamer’s concern and probing questions, the
Black Knight’s long monologues praising Whyte and railing against Fortune
are cathartic, helping him to overcome his grief. To be sure, the Black Knight
bitches about Fortune, condemning her insidious treachery and duplicity,
sputtering, “She ys fals, and ever laughynge/With oon eye, and that other
wepynge” (633–34). He goes on to liken her to a “scorpioun,” that “fals, flat-
erynge beste” (636–37). Yet his discourse also diverges from bitching, adopt-
ing a more positive resonance that reinforces the Dreamer’s affective response.
Many of the associations surrounding gossip—both in the Middle Ages and
today—emphasize its tendency toward malicious cruelty. The Middle English
verb bakbiten, like its modern English equivalent, highlights this connota-
tion. Still, the Black Knight’s laudatory descriptions of Whyte are far from
cruel; he spends the majority of his time praising his lady. In undergirding his
discourse with positive, if melancholy, emotions in addition to his malicious
feelings toward Fortune, the Black Knight strengthens the cathartic effect of
his speech and the intimacy of the bond he forms with the Dreamer.

32. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 68. Lochrie’s discussion of the Middle English verbs for
gossip does not include gabben, but it is helpful for comparison.
33. Deborah Jones, “Gossip: Notes on Women’s Oral Culture,” in Deborah Cameron, ed.,
The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader (New York, 1990), 242–50 (reprinted from Women’s
Studies International Quarterly 3 [1980]: 193–98).

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 adin esther lears 217

Like bitching, “chatting” is a highly intimate form of gossip. According to

Jones, it involves mutual self-disclosure about issues or concerns in a woman’s
life. Although the Dreamer never reveals any of his own troubles at length,
there is an element of cooperation and exchange in the Dreamer’s consis-
tent and engaged responses, rendering the conversation between the two
men close to the chatting that Jones describes. Jennifer Coates emphasizes
this idea of reciprocal exchange, paying particular attention to “simultane-
ous speech” in conversations among women. Such chatting occurs when a
main speaker is telling a story, and a second speaker interjects with a question
or comment related to the first speaker’s story. Coates stresses that, far from
being a competitive drive to acquire control, as other linguists have suggested,
women’s interruptions can be characterized as an “‘overlap-as-enthusiasm’
strategy.”34 When these enthusiastic verbal interventions take place in private,
outside of public domains where interruption is a strategy for gaining control
of the audience’s attention, this form of simultaneous speech is coopera-
tive: “the way in which women speakers work together to produce shared
meanings.”35 As I have shown, following Shoaf, the Dreamer often interjects
comments and questions into the Black Knight’s speech, aiming to draw him
out and promote a more thorough confession of his thoughts and emotions.
These interruptions fit Coates’s characterization of cooperative female speech
and serve to underscore the intimacy of the discourse between the Dreamer
and the Black Knight.
Coates also broadens Jones’s assertion that the topic of women’s discus-
sion centers on their relations to men as wives, girlfriends, and mothers, argu-
ing that all-female groups tend to discuss “people and feelings,” in contrast to
a male inclination to talk about “things.” The catalyst for the Black Knight’s
speech and his initial reason for talking to the Dreamer is his sorwe. Indeed,
the word and its variants emerge nine times in the space of the first thirty-
seven lines spoken by the Black Knight to the Dreamer. Other words such as
wo and pitee also occur, adding to our understanding of the Knight’s preoc-
cupation with feeling. The word sorwe increases in frequency in this speech,
occurring six times within the last seven lines and culminating with the Black
Knight’s assertion that “y am sorwe and sorwe ys y” (597). Here, the Black
Knight is so preoccupied with his sorwe that, to quote Richard Rambuss, he

34. Jennifer Coates, “Gossip Revisited: Language in all Female Groups,” in Jennifer Coates
and Deborah Cameron, eds., Women in Their Speech Communities: New Perspectives on Language
and Sex (New York, 1988), 108.
35. Coates, “Gossip Revisited,” 113.

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218 The Chaucer Review

has reduced his own identity to “a chiastic personification of it.”36 The Black
Knight’s emphasis on his sorrow, and later on exhaustively describing his lady
Whyte, points toward a gossip-adjacent form of discourse that is consistent
with the elegiac mode of the poem.
Though both Jones and Coates provide helpful accounts of gossip, their
gender-essentialism introduces a red herring—the incomplete notion that
gossip is “women’s talk.” The fact that the Dreamer and the Black Knight are
engaging in gossip or a discourse that resembles gossip does not feminize them
or contribute to their queerness by rendering them “like women.” Despite the
trend of scholarship that has identified gossip as a discourse of resistance that
thrives among marginalized groups, gossip was ubiquitous in the Middle
Ages, flourishing among men and women alike.37 Yet to claim that, because
of this ubiquity, it is not a form of marginalized discourse is mistaken. Gossip
was unauthorized speech, considered dangerous and unproductive by clerical
authorities. Rather than marginalizing the Dreamer and the Black Knight by
figuring them as effeminate, gossip does its queer work through its transgres-
sive associations with idleness and through the intimacy it promotes between
the two men. Despite their idleness, this intimacy suggests the productive
potential of idle talk. It points to the way that their queer friendship simulta-
neously redeems them and resists consolation or correction for their melan-
cholic states. Confession is, after all, never final. Because error is built into the
human condition, confession is forever necessary. The Dreamer’s reference to
the Knight’s “shryfte wythoute repentaunce” (1114; emphasis added) ensures his
return to confession. Gossip, too, is self-sustaining and eternal.38 While their
friendship is redemptive, these mechanisms of circular and self-perpetuating
speech serve to confirm the infinite continuation of idleness and unorthodox
sexuality in the Black Knight and the Dreamer.

36. Richard Rambuss, “‘Processe of Tyme’: History, Consolation, and Apocalypse in the
Book of the Duchess,” Exemplaria 2 (1990): 659–83, at 675.
37. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York, 1985). Spacks’s work initiates a tradition of
scholarship that emphasizes gossip as a discourse of resistance. In response to this strand of schol-
arship, Phillips, Transforming Talk, attempts to recover gossip from its status as a marginalized
discourse, showing how utterly commonplace it was as a discursive and literary mode.
38. Chaucer gestures toward the endless productive machinery of gossip in HF, where he
likens the mechanism of speech to the appearance of water disturbed by a stone: “Throwe on water
now a stoon,/Wel wost thou hyt wol make anoon/A litel roundell as a sercle,/Paraunter brod as a
covercle;/And ryght anoon thow shalt see wel/That whel wol cause another whel,/And that the
thridde, and so forth, brother,/Every sercle causynge other/ . . . /And ryght thus every word, ywys,/
That lowd or pryvee spoken ys,/Moveth first an ayr aboute,/And of thys movynge, out of doute,/
Another ayr anoon ys meved” (789–96, 809–13). With a similar rippling effect, sound refracts and
multiplies endlessly through the House of Fame and the hum of rumor “encres[es] ever moo”
(2077).

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 adin esther lears 219

The end of the poem extends this paradoxical condition as it offers an

ambiguous partial consolation for the Black Knight. Abandoning the elevated
language he has used throughout the poem to address his love for Whyte, the
Black Knight concludes starkly, “She ys ded” (1309), to which the Dreamer
offers feebly, “Be God, hyt ys routhe” (1310). This barren exchange marks the
end of the Knight’s conversation with the Dreamer. He rides away toward
his “long castel with walles white” (1318). The phrase also shifts the Black
Knight’s rhetoric from a high courtly style to a more direct vernacular idiom.
In Shoaf ’s view, this bald statement constitutes the Black Knight’s consola-
tion, as if his confession—and gossip—had completed its job. Yet it is difficult
to imagine how the Dreamer’s response might offer any solace to the Black
Knight. This apparent absence of consolation for the Knight suggests an idle
lack of progress in the poem as a whole.
Indeed, the poem’s apparent failure to move forward is shown at the
formal level of language in the last few lines. Seamlessly moving from the
dream narrative back into the waking world, the Dreamer comments on his
marvelous dream:

Thoghte I, “Thys ys so queynt a sweven

That I wol, be processe of tyme,
Fonde to putte this sweven in ryme
As I kan best, and that anoon.”
This was my sweven; now hit ys doon.
(1330–34)

These final lines circle back to the beginning, rearticulating the origin of the
poem. Chaucer’s use of “wol”—a word that was semiotically unstable around
the late fourteenth century as it shifted from an expression of “wish” or
“desire” (from the Old English willan) to the simple future “will”—is telling.
It points to a deliberate manipulation of syntax so that Chaucer might include
three separate verb tenses in the final few lines: future (wol), past (was), and
present (ys). The Dreamer’s characterization of his dream as “queynt” rein-
forces the circular movement conveyed in these shifting tenses. The Middle
English word queint could mean “strange, unusual, marvelous, or peculiar”—
undoubtedly the primary meaning of the word in this context. Yet the word
also carried connotations of craft or skill. The expression queinte of gin could
mean “ingenious” or “skillful and able.” Queinte wordes often meant “inge-
niously made or skillfully wrought language.”39 Chaucer himself uses the
39. MED, s.v. queint (adj.).

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220 The Chaucer Review

word several times in his corpus to emphasize artificiality and ­craftsmanship.

The house of Rumor is “queyntelych ywrought” (1923); its elaborate gyra-
tions, too, are “queynte” (1925). In the Miller’s Tale, the word underscores
ingenuity of argument “As clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte” (I 3275).
And in the Squire’s Tale “queynte” refers to the optical illusions described by
Aristotle (V 234). To characterize his dream as “queynte,” then, combines with
Chaucer’s strange manipulation of tenses to suggest that the dream he has just
reported has already been written down. The circular formation at the end of
the poem seems to go nowhere, condemning the Black Knight, the Dreamer,
and the reader to an endless reiteration of this tale of melancholy and grief.
Despite its regressive, idling structure, the poem imagines a future,
suggesting the productive potential of queer affinities. As his dream inspires
his poetry, the Dreamer’s idle melancholia is reassigned productive value.
Without the dream produced by the Dreamer’s melancholic state of mind,
the poem would not have come into being. In this metapoetic gesture of self-
authorization, the poem anticipates Chaucer’s future literary production,
positioning the Book of the Duchess in a foundational place within his body
of work. Except for his translation of the Roman de la Rose, the Book of the
Duchess was Chaucer’s first major work in English. To some, the poem may
appear highly derivative of earlier French work by French courtly writers,
such as the Rose authors Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, as well as
Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart. Yet Chaucer made elaborations
and innovations in the Book of the Duchess that mark the beginning of his
prolific and creative poetic career—one of the first to elevate the English
language to an equivalent level of prestige as French, heretofore the dominant
written language at court.40 Despite its circularity, the poem gestures outward
toward unremitting invention in a way that resonates with Sedgwick’s notion
of queerness as “inextinguishable.”41 In their generative circularity, the last
few lines of Chaucer’s early poem complete and set off his poetics of idling: his
preoccupation with making something from nothing and with the produc-
tive potential of idleness.
The role of idleness—in particular, idle talk—in shaping Chaucer’s liter-
ary production in the Book of the Duchess anticipates the poet’s interest in
spoken discourse in his next major dream poem, the House of Fame. This
work, in which the poet’s dreamer-avatar travels to the houses of Fame and
Rumor, might be said to be chiefly concerned with making something from

40. Pearsall, The Life, 64–68.

41. Sedgwick, “Foreword,” xii.

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 adin esther lears 221

nothing, as it stresses the physical materiality of sound, constructs auditory

architectures, and explains the phenomenon in terms of “lyghted smoke”
and “air ybroke” (769–70). Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the
influence of oral/aural modes on Chaucer’s literary production without
acknowledging the place of Chaucer’s first vernacular poem in relation to
these ­mechanisms.42 The Book of the Duchess shows that Chaucer’s preoccu-
pation with speaking and listening extends further back than scholars have
previously acknowledged, and it reinforces the foundational role of gossip
and other idle “noise” in Chaucer’s poetic canon. While this emphasis on the
value of apparently worthless speech seems contradictory, even perverse,
the paradoxical figures that make up Chaucer’s poetics of idling marvelously
render passive into active, idle into creative, and, finally, suggest a queer way
to make something from nothing.

Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
(ael74@cornell.edu)

42. In addition to Phillips, Transforming Talk, see Lesley Kordecki, Ecofeminist Subjectivities:
Chaucer’s Talking Birds (New York, 2011).

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