SOURCE: "The Book of the Duchess: Chaucer and the Medieval Physicians," in The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Early Medicine, Duquesne University Press, 1995, pp. 38-65.

In the following excerpt, Heffernan analyzes the narrator of the Book of the Duchess in terms of medieval concepts of depression.

Comparing Chaucer's understanding of mental states, as it appears in The Book of the Duchess, with those ideas recorded in medical texts makes even more evident the human values in the poem to which generations of readers have responded. Examining Chaucer thus is not an unliterary approach. Even Robert Jordan [in Chaucer's Poetics and the Modern Reader], examining the poem to uncover the general principles that preside over its status as literary discourse, gets dangerously close to meaning (for a critical theorist) when he points to the fact that 1,000 lines of this 1,300-line poem are elegiac. It has been called "the most...