Making Chaucer's Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception is the first comprehensive, book-length study of Geoffrey Chaucer's earliest major narrative poem, its critical contexts, and its literary reception. It provides a rigorous and critically balanced assimilation of the Book of the Duchess, the story of its reception and dissemination, and the major trends in its interpretive history into the fabric of twenty-first century Chaucer studies. The notion of 'making', drawn from the vocabulary of the poem itself, integrates all of the textual processes with which this study is concerned: writing, reading and reception.