Ethics and Interpretation: Reading Wills in Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women'

Author / Editor
Simpson, James.

Title
Ethics and Interpretation: Reading Wills in Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women'

Published
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 73-100.

Description
Reads LGW as a work about "voluntarist" hermeneutics, reflected in Cupid's "cupidinous," tyrannical understanding of TC and in the narrator's telling of the legends as a "testamentary document of a dying author."
Modeled on Ovid's "Heroides," LGW represents the suppression of authorship by interpretive aggressiveness, suggesting a need for readers to be aware of the validity of an author's intent as well as their own.

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