The Legend of Good Women and the Affect of Invention

Description: Analyzes LGW as "a narrative treatise on the 'affect of invention,'" linking the processes of emergence that precede the mind's conscious recognition of emotion with the inventional processes which culminate in poetic art. LGWP introduces a method for reconceptualizing invention, and the legends dramatize the process by which affect and invention collapse into emotion and poetry. The poem exposes the discourses that shape late medieval ideas of gender and the affect that infuses those discourses with power.