Chaucer's Legend of Good Women purports to be a defence of women. A defence presupposes that a charge has been levelled, or that a slander requires an answer. In the fiction of this poem, it is Chaucer himself who is accused of perpetrating a slander on women's reputation, since he chose to write of the unfaithful Criseyde in an earlier work. He must therefore make amends for this sin against the God of Love by composing an exemplary collection of stories of women who ‘were true in loving all their lives’. Thus the Legend is a palinode and sits squarely in an ancient literary tradition which commonly concerned itself with the relative merits and demerits of women and men.

The palinode or poetic recantation is above all a display of rhetorical skill in pleading a case, and from the time the palinode form made its first appearance in ancient Greek literature — when in a new poem Stesichorus recanted the ‘sin’ of slandering the archetypally feminine Helen of Troy with a new poem in her favour — the cause which was taken up was the defence of women or of love. Two poems likely to have influenced Chaucer's Legend are considered palinodes: Book III of the Ars Amatoria by Ovid, and Le Jugement dou Roy de Navarre by Chaucer's near contemporary Guillaume de Machaut.