Chaucer’s Fortune: A Necessary Invention

Abstract

ABSTRACT Chaucer’s Boethian lyrics repay a critical approach that views them not only as court poetry but also as sophisticated responses to their source, The Consolation of Philosophy. This article demonstrates how the lyric Fortune engages ambitiously with Boethius’s central arguments about randomness, providence, and human moral action. Spoken by two voices, the poem dramatizes a conflict not between its speakers, but between rational knowledge and emotional experience, building to a climax in which Fortune declares herself nonexistent. This paradoxical moment captures the Boethian insight that although Fortune is not real, it is necessary for humans to invent her. Chaucer’s approach in this poem is to heighten the subtle tensions he found in the Consolation between the rational apprehension of higher truth and the emotional experience of life in a contingent world. Fortune thus illustrates Chaucer’s approach to Boethius as a source not of otherworldly consolation but of this-worldly wisdom.