Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Note on the text
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I Chaucer's Good Woman
- 1 The Good Woman: the daisy
- 2 Alceste: the Good Woman of legend
- 3 The Good Woman: a legendary beast?
- II The God of Love
- III The Palinode
- IV The Legends of good women
- V The Legend as courtly game
- Epilogue
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
2 - Alceste: the Good Woman of legend
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Note on the text
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I Chaucer's Good Woman
- 1 The Good Woman: the daisy
- 2 Alceste: the Good Woman of legend
- 3 The Good Woman: a legendary beast?
- II The God of Love
- III The Palinode
- IV The Legends of good women
- V The Legend as courtly game
- Epilogue
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Summary
I turn now to the dream vision section of the Legend of Good Women in which the narrator dreams of a lady dressed like a daisy. In his dreaming imagination he associates the transcendental marguerite of French lyric poetry with a classical story of an all but perfect woman, the legendary Queen Alceste of Thrace.
When night falls and the daisy of the field closes, nothing remains for the poet but to hasten to his own rest in a bed of grass and flowers which he has made up ‘in a litel herber that I have/ That benched was on turves fressh ygrave’ (F 203–4), where the activities of the day lead him to dream of the God of Love and the object of his devotion:
Me mette how I lay in the medewe thoo,
To seen this flour that I so love and drede;
And from afer com walkyng in the mede
The god of Love, and in his hand a quene.
F 210–13
The God of Love and a consort (frequently surrounded by companies of famous lovers, as in Froissart's Paradis d'Amour) had been among the most familiar protagonists of literary dream visions for several centuries. Moreover, the connection between the dream and the concerns of the dreamer's waking life are here particularly clearly drawn because it appears to him that the queen's clothing makes her ‘lyk a daysie for to sene’:
And she was clad in real habit grene.[…]
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- Information
- Chaucer's Legendary Good Women , pp. 43 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998