Through Nature to Eternity: Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women"

Description: Thinness of critical response shows modern failure to perceive LGW's intended complexities. The question of which version of the Prologue was written first has not been settled. In a discussion based on F, Rowe identifies the daisy and Alceste as an image of universal natural order showing nature and poetry as analogous manifestations of truth.; The incongruities of the legends stem from the imposed demands of the Prologue, but they do not illustrate the impossibility of the prescription, nor is the poem primarily about books. The legends are individualized expressions of the narrator, the world he creates from old books corresponding to the nature and order of hell.; Tracing a brutal descent from passion to seduction to forcible betrayal, the legends are specifically informed by Dante's "Inferno" and testify to the human potential for good and evil. The deliberately abrupt ending of LGW implies the narrator's abandoning his books to return to his seasonal devotion to the daisy. LGW invites a broad range of critical approaches, from historical to textual to feminist studies.