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 thoghtPurely for defaute of slepThat, by my trouthe, I take no kepOf 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 allegorical force as it “cometh or gooth” and as the narrator describes his “felyng in nothyng.” This allegory illogically suggests that the Dreamer finds something—a feeling—in nothing, a paradoxical notion that anticipates a deep preoccupation throughout the poem with a making something from nothing, valuing passive as active, and finding productivity in idleness.2Idleness is an important though little-studied aspect of medieval culture, as James Simpson has argued.3 Simpson articulates a literary principle of “idling” based on the repeated echoing of prior sources. In doing so, he suggests, a poem “enacts yet somehow resists the possibility of literary 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 idleness 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 queering force, rendering him passive and effeminate. Kruger further suggests that it is through the Dreamer's homosocial interaction with the Black 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 equation 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 melancholia 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 demonstrated, 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 dangerously 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 unproductive. 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 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 deceptive 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 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.15The 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, emptiness, 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 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 plentevous 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.19The 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 dredeDoun to hys herte, to make hym warm—For wel hyt feled the herte had harm—To wite eke why hyt was adradBy kynde, and for to make hyt glad,For hyt ys membre principalOf the body; and that made alHys hewe chaunge and wexe greneAnd pale, for ther noo blood ys seneIn no maner lym of hys.(490–99) 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 assertion 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 lornThat me ys wo that I was born!May noght make my sorwes slyde,Nought al the remedyes of Ovide,Ne Orpheus, god of melodye,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 pastoral 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.22By introducing confession as a discursive mode, Chaucer engages with one of the central spiritual concerns of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the practice 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.24As Shoaf has demonstrated, the Dreamer's questioning of the Black Knight illustrates the circumstantiae peccati model of confessional questioning. This model is concerned with eliciting a broad picture of the circumstances surrounding a sin so that the penitent might achieve a more thorough confession. The seven interrogatives designed to promote the more perfect confession 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 hoolyIn what wyse, how, why, and wherforeThat 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 manereTo 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 physician, the confessor's responsibility was to heal the sinner's soul rather 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 yeeWolde 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 hoolI 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 confession] 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 discovering 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 discourse on pleasure.28 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 practice 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 metaphorical 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 communication, 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 penitential 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.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 intimacy 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, flaterynge beste” (636–37). Yet his discourse also diverges from bitching, adopting 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 connotation. 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.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 consistent 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 “simultaneous 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 cooperative: “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 discussion centers on their relations to men as wives, girlfriends, and mothers, arguing 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 preoccupation 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 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 transgressive 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 simultaneously redeems them and resists consolation or correction for their melancholic 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.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 consolation, 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 swevenThat I wol, be processe of tyme,Fonde to putte this sweven in rymeAs 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” reinforces 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 “ingeniously made or skillfully wrought language.”39 Chaucer himself uses the word several times in his corpus to emphasize artificiality and craftsmanship. The house of Rumor is “queyntelych ywrought” (1923); its elaborate gyrations, 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 productive potential of idleness.The role of idleness—in particular, idle talk—in shaping Chaucer's literary 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 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 preoccupation 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.