A fresh reading of the Legend shows it to be one of Chaucer’s most carefully crafted and significant works.
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.
Tabella dei contenuti
Introduction
Love of Books
Exemplary Women
As Etik seith: Aristotelian Ideas in the
Legend
Women in Love: on the Unity of
The Legend of Good Women and
Troilus and Criseyde
A New Paradigm: Comedy and the Individual
Epilogue
Circa l’autore
CAROLYN COLLETTE is an American literary critic whose work has focused on late Medieval Anglo-French literary culture. She is Professor Emerita of English literature at Mount Holyoke College.
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