Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Note on the text
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I Chaucer's Good Woman
- II The God of Love
- III The Palinode
- IV The Legends of good women
- 9 Ariadne: the ladies and the critics
- 10 Medea: the ladies and their reputations
- 11 Cleopatra: legend of Cupid's saint
- 12 Dido: composite woman
- 13 Lucrece: too good to be true?
- 14 Phyllis and inherited male perfidy
- V The Legend as courtly game
- Epilogue
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
10 - Medea: the ladies and their reputations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Note on the text
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I Chaucer's Good Woman
- II The God of Love
- III The Palinode
- IV The Legends of good women
- 9 Ariadne: the ladies and the critics
- 10 Medea: the ladies and their reputations
- 11 Cleopatra: legend of Cupid's saint
- 12 Dido: composite woman
- 13 Lucrece: too good to be true?
- 14 Phyllis and inherited male perfidy
- V The Legend as courtly game
- Epilogue
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Summary
Ovid's Heroides, the classical text purporting to sympathise with women on which Chaucer draws heavily in the Legend, depended for its appreciation on its audience's knowledge of the treatment of the heroines in other texts. A weakness in one of the most important modern studies of the Legend, Frank's Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women, is that it takes very little account of what Chaucer's audience might have known and thought of the subjects of his Legends. Frank's procedure of taking the Legends at their face value reveals many of their very real virtues, but the suspicion of many modern readers that Chaucer had an overriding ironic purpose in treating as ‘good’ heroines who were frequently considered ‘bad’ is not allayed, indeed is often enhanced by Frank's analysis.
For a very long time the Legend was read as a faintly boring collection of naive eulogies of classical ladies whom medieval people alone could have considered ‘good’. ‘The rubric “explicit Legenda Cleopataras Martirs”’, said the editor F. N. Robinson, ‘has a humor for us that it could not have had for the readers at the court of Richard II.’ But, he noted disapprovingly, the suggestion that Chaucer had a ‘satirical purpose’ and the ‘attempt to find unrecognized humor in the Legend … is ill-advised’.
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- Information
- Chaucer's Legendary Good Women , pp. 199 - 220Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998