How serious was Chaucer in his desire to defend women's virtue in the Legend of Good Women? All the evidence adduced in the various aspects of my study suggests that he was not entirely serious. Rather, when he indicates that the purpose of his poem was to speak well of women, he was inviting his audience to participate with him in a familiar game, one of the age's most popular. Literary versions of the game of discussing the nature of Woman had many permutations. For example, in the Legend it finds expression in the elegant phrasemaking in praise of the daisy/Alceste, the Good Woman par excellence. By contrast, it includes Chaucer's reworkings of classical stories, which tended to subvert the God of Love's contention that ninety-nine per cent of women are virtuous. When medieval gentlemen were not praising women or laughing at them, they were often pitying them, and thus an emotional engagement with women's position in the world is also encompassed in the Legend of Good Women's version of the debate about women. It was a game which could be adapted for many different purposes and responses: thus Chaucer used the daisy motif to pay tribute to some important female personage, his ‘lady sovereyne’, very likely Queen Anne; again, the strongly affective portrayals of women's suffering indulged, I would suggest, his audience's impulse to give vent to that pity which infallibly indicated a noble heart; moreover, the stories in whose heroines we find so much to argue about were designed, I believe, to promote partisan, gender-biased argument in his original audience.