ABSTRACT
Gardens figure prominently in three of Chaucer’s four extant dream-poems as settings through which his dreamers walk, or into which they wake. In the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s narrator enters a well-ordered grove in his dream in which trees, spaced well apart, are kept clean of brush and low-growing branches; in the Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer’s dreamer enters a walled garden at the urging of his guide, Scipio, where he discovers flowery meadows, an exotic temple, and Nature’s own bower; and in the Legend of Good Women, written later in Chaucer’s career, Chaucer’s narrator falls asleepin a small herber furnished with new turf benches, before he wakes to a vision of the god of Love himself, and the dream is set, not surprisingly, in a spring meadow reminiscent of medieval tapestry designs. Most Chaucerians tend to read these descriptions as stock medieval topoi, which to an extent they clearly are. But these invented gardens also resemble built gardens of the period. New research on the history of gardens suggests that, for many of Chaucer’s garden settings, he drew on a pleasure garden aesthetic prevalent in aristocratic culture and evident in built gardens as well as in other literary works. In addition, Chaucer not only uses stock descriptions for these outdoor spaces, but he also combines garden topoi in new ways, self-consciously playing on the conventions of nature description. Finally, the placement of these pleasure gardens within their narratives suggests a symbolic role. Themselves well-ordered outdoor spaces, these gardens serve as thresholds into well-ordered narratives, providing a visual and spatial analogue to the construction of a successful story.
