'The Legend of Good Women': Chaucer's 'Purgatorio'

Author / Editor
Kiser, Lisa J.

Title
'The Legend of Good Women': Chaucer's 'Purgatorio'

Published
ELH 54 (1987): 741-60.

Description
Despite totally different tone and purpose, Chaucer's LGWP parallels Dante's "Purgatorio" significantly: both poets present their narrators as undergoing penance; both Alceste and Beatrice, allegorically garbed and attended, serve as spiritual mediators, heralds of deities, and reconcilers of the classical with the contemporary. Dante's profession of reality contrasts with Chaucer's evident fiction.

Chaucer Subjects
Legend of Good Women.
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.