SOURCE: "The Book of the Duchess," in Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems, edited by A. J. Minnis et al., Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 73-90.

Minnis is a scholar of Medieval Literature and the author of many notable works including Chaucer and the Pagan Antiquity and Chaucer's Boece and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius. In the following excerpt, Minnis uses historical information and analyses of verse form, rhetoric, and style to praise Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess.

Blanche of Lancaster died on 12 September 1368, perhaps of the plague. Two major monuments were constructed to preserve her memory. One was a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, this being (as far as we know) his first substantial composition; he was probably in his mid-twenties at the time of Blanche's death. The other was the work of her husband, John of Gaunt, the third surviving son of King Edward III. In 1374 he...