Chaucer's Legendary Good Women
- Author / Editor
- Percival, Florence.
Chaucer's Legendary Good Women
- Published
- Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Physical Description
- xii, 338 pp.
- Description
- Chaucer's LGW testifies to the disparate views of women prevalent in the Middle Ages. A complex medieval notion of Woman informs the structure of the poem: in the prologue, Chaucer praises conventional ideas of female virtue, while in the legends he shows a humorous skepticism, apparently influenced by contemporary antifeminist traditions.
- The debate Chaucer promotes could be relied on to entertain many medieval readers, while at the same time demonstrating how the vernacular translator-poet could handle language wittily and play with authorative texts.
- A close reading of the poem in light of literary, historical political, and social texts.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Legend of Good Women.
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.