An outstanding poem and a consummate example of employing the dream vision technique. It is one of the longest works of Chaucer. The poet unfolds ten stories of virtuous women in nine sections. It is one of the first mock-heroic works in English Literature. Inspirational!...

"Professor Collette's approach to this challenging and provocative poem reflects her wide scholarly interests, her expertise in the area of representations of women in late medieval European society, and her conviction that the Legend of Good Women can be better understood when positioned within several of the era's intellectual concerns and historical contexts. The book will enrich the ongoing conversation among Chaucerians as to the significance of the Legend, both as an individual cultural production and an important constituent of Chaucer's poetic.achievement. A praiseworthy and useful monograph." Professor Robert Hanning, Columbia University. The Legend of Good Women has perhaps not always had the appreciation or attention it deserves. Here, it is read as one of Chaucer's major texts, a thematically and artistically sophisticated work whose veneer of transparency and narrow focus masks a vital inquiry into basic questions of value, moderation, and sincerity in late medieval culture. The volume places Chaucer within several literary contexts developed in separate chapters: early humanist bibliophilia, translation and the development of the vernacular; late medieval compendia of exemplary narratives centred in women's choices written by Boccaccio, Machaut, Gower and Christine de Pizan; and the pervasive late fourteenth-century cultural influence of Aristotelian ideas of the mean, moderation, and value, focusing on Oresme's translations of the Ethics into French. It concludes with two chapters on the context of Chaucer's continual reconsideration of issues of exchange, moderation and fidelity apparent in thematic, figurative and semantic connections that link the Legend both to Troilus and Criseyde and to the women of The Canterbury Tales. Carolyn Collette is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College and a Research Associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York.

Dispatched to Florence in 1373 to secure a loan for Edward III, poet and diplomat Geoffrey Chaucer encounters resistance from the banker's blind brother, a situation that is further complicated when the banker is found murdered.

A sequel to her seminal book on Chaucer’s House of Fame, Sheila Delany’s elegant and innovative study of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women explores what it meant to be a reader and a writer, and to be English and a courtier, in the late fourteenth century. The richness of late medieval art, philosophy, and history are powerfully brought to bear on one of Chaucer’s most controversial works. So too are the insights of modern critical theory—semiotics, historicism, and gender studies especially—making this a unique achievement in medieval and Chaucerian studies. Delany’s strikingly original readings of Chaucer’s Orientalism, his sexual wordplay, his theological attitudes, and his treatment of sex and gender have given us a Chaucer for our time. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

A study of romance and the Orient in Chaucer and in anonymous popular metrical romances. The idea of the Orient is a major motif in Chaucer and medieval romance, and this new study reveals much about its use and significance, setting the literature in its historical context and thereby offering fresh new readings of anumber of texts. The author begins by looking at Chaucer's and Gower's treatment of the legend of Constance, as told by the Man of Law, demonstrating that Chaucer's addition of a pattern of mercantile details highlights the commercial context of the eastern Mediterranean in which the heroine is placed; she goes on to show how Chaucer's portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the Legend of Good Women, read against parallel texts, especially in Boccaccio, reveal them to be loci of medieval orientalism. She then examines Chaucer's inventive handling of details taken from Eastern sources and analogues in the Squire's Tale, showing how he shapes them into the western form ofinterlace. The author concludes by looking at two romances, Floris and Blauncheflur and Le Bone Florence of Rome; she argues that elements in Floris of sibling incest are legitimised into a quest for the beloved, and demonstrates that Le Bone Florence be related to analogous oriental tales about heroic women who remain steadfast in virtue against persecution and adversity. Professor CAROL F. HEFFERNAN teaches in the Department ofEnglish, Rutgers University.

Essays re-examining the Legend of Good Women, placing it in its cultural and historical context.

This book is a lucid introduction and intelligent examination of Chaucer's narrative poetry.

Sheila Delany's spirited translation of Osbern Bokenham's Legendys of Hooly Wummen (1443-1447) makes available in modern English the first all-female hagiography. Closely translated from elaborate, Latinate Middle English verse into fluent prose, A Legend of Holy Women contains the Augustinian friar's version of the stories of 13 women saints from gospel, apocrypha, martyrology, and high-medieval history. As Delany writes in her comprehensive introduction, "Bokenham gives us not only an all-female hagiography--an authorial decision significant in its own right--but a gallery of powerful, articulate women who are indubitably worthy to do God's work. Some of them are well-educated, some give sound political advice to a monarch, some preach, converting hundreds and thousands to Christianity, some walk on water or perform resurrection. Nor are they pacifists; on the contrary, they call for divinely inflicted vengeance and approve violence in their cause." Delany argues that Geoffrey Chaucer's Legend of Good Women provided a principle of selection and of arrangement for Bokenham's array of saints. She suggests further that the friar's choice of all-female hagiography, and his poetic representation of holy women, are closely linked to patronage and politics in fifteenth-century England. The translation is accompanied by full notes which, along with the introduction, make the book accessible to a wide audience. It will appeal to all readers interested in the representation of women in late-medieval culture as well as to scholars and students in medieval, renaissance, religious, and women's studies.

Spanning Chaucer's working life, these four poems build on the medieval convention of 'love visions' - poems inspired by dreams, woven into rich allegories about the rituals and emotions of courtly love. In The Book of the Duchess, the most traditional of the four, the dreamer meets a widower who has loved and lost the perfect lady, and The House of Fame describes a dream journey in which the poet meets with classical divinities. Witty, lively and playful, The Parliament of Birds details an encounter with the birds of the world in the Garden of Nature as they seek to meet their mates, while The Legend of Good Women sees Chaucer being censured by the God of Love, and seeking to make amends, for writing poems that depict unfaithful women. Together, the four create a marvellously witty, lively and humane self-portrait of the poet.