Abstract
Scholars have long debated whether Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women was a serious attempt to praise noble women or a tongue-in-cheek deflation of the genre. Earlier criticism tended to dismiss it as an unsuccessful prelude to the more satisfactory The Canterbury Tales for which it was abandoned. With the rise of feminist criticism in the 1970s several serious attempts were made to grapple with the “woman’s question” in this most complex of texts. Generally speaking, critical opinion was divided between those scholars who regarded its vision of “good women” as ironic and those who saw it as well i mentioned and sincere. Inevitably, this question of authorial intention raised the even more complex problem of audience reception: was it conceived for a small audience of male initiates with whom Chaucer was sharing his ironic attitude to women or was it written for a female courtly audience and thus intended to dramatize the long-standing debate about women defended and women defamed with famous women of antiquity as the central protagonists?1
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Notes
Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 9.
Lisa J. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales. Chaucer and The Legend of Good Women (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 21.
S. H. Rugby, Chaucer in Context (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 118.
Sheila Dela ny, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
Johannes von Tepl, Der Ackerman, edited by Willy Krogman (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1954).
see Johannes von Saaz (Tepl), The Plowman from Bohemia, translated by Alexander and Elizabeth Henderson (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966). Quotations in this chapter refer to this edition.
For a discussion of these problems and the hypothesis that the German and Czech works both derive from a lost common source, see Antonín Hrubý, Der ‘Ackermann’ und seine Vorlage (Munich: Beck, 1971).
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by David R. Slavitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
See Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 22–3.
R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
See Richard Rex, The Lollards (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 2002), 38.
See Christian Kiening, Schwierige Modernität: Der Ackermann Johannes von Tepls und die Ambiguität historischen Wandels ( Tübingen : Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 22.
For Machaut’s marguerite poetry, see James Wimsatt, The Margeurite Poetry of Guillaume de Machaut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970).
Thomas Usk, Testament of Love, edited by R. Allen Shoaf (Kalamazoo, 1998), 56.
Nicholas Watson, “The Gawain-Poet as a Vernacular Theologian,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 293–313 at 299.
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© 2015 Alfred Thomas
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Thomas, A. (2015). Women Defended, Women Defamed: The Legend of Good Women, The Plowman from Bohemia, and The Little Weaver. In: Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542601_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542601_7
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