Ethics and Interpretation: Reading Wills in Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women'
- Author / Editor
- Simpson, James.
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.