“What me is”: Insomnia Cures, Saintly Miracles, and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess as Illness Narrative

Abstract

Unlike its immediate sources, French dits amoureux by Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart that privilege love adventure, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess is centrally concerned with illness and healing and the ways that they shape embodied experience. The medicalized attention Chaucer’s poem brings to the narrator’s insomnia in particular reveals connections to both contemporary natural philosophy and hagiographic miracle collections, which sometimes included insomnia among conditions cured through saintly intervention. In the Book of the Duchess, sleeplessness is a canvas for an immersive meditation on the body, its creative processes, and problems of identity, or “what me is” (line 31). Looking beyond the French courtly register that has dominated critical interpretation, this essay reframes Chaucer’s poem in its contemporary intellectual context as an early instance of “illness narrative,” drawing methodological support from theories of intertextuality as well as the sociology and ethnography of illness. The poem’s healing trajectory, differently relevant to the dreamer, the Man in Black, and White, ultimately affirms the communicative movement from self to other and the therapeutic value of empathy as necessary conditions for the poet’s creative agency.