Authorship and the Canon
A canon is a body of work. We most often hear it used to refer to the “Western canon,” or the set of literature, music, philosophy, and art that has become perceived as the embodiment of European high culture. However, the term is useful for discussing any collection of works that are often analyzed as a group. For example, “the Shakespeare canon” refers to the plays, sonnets, and long poems recognized as Shakespeare’s work. That canon has overarching characteristics. We might say that the Shakespeare canon is characterized by rich language, playful use of borrowed material, and a mixture of comedy, tragedy, and history.
In the Prologue of the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer is constructing his own canon—the Chaucer canon. When Cupid and Alceste condemn him for failing to write charitably about women, they list his previous works. Rather than just a few characteristic pieces, Chaucer has them systematically catalog his entire career: his verse translations of the Roman de la Rose and Troilus and Cressida, his short poems, his prose translations of Boethius and the writings of Pope Innocent III, his long poems The Death of Blanche (today The Book of the Duchess), The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and the romance of Palamon and Arcite.
Print did not yet exist in the Middle Ages, so texts were distributed as individually copied manuscripts. Many of these may have failed to mention the author. By listing all his works together in the prologue, Chaucer marks them as his own, and encourages his reader to recognize that ownership. They shouldn’t just think of the House of Fame in isolation, but rather see it as one member of the group of writings composed by Chaucer. Indeed, Cupid and Alceste’s assignment to Chaucer derives from their own assessment of the Chaucer canon. Looking at the group of writings by Chaucer, they identify that he is missing only work on the faithfulness of women. Though it’s presented as a reprimand in the poem, Chaucer is really telling us that with this new Legend, his canon will be a little closer to having everything.
The Value of Literature
The very first lines of the Legend concern the necessity of books as a source of knowledge. As Chaucer writes, everyone recognizes that “there is good in heaven and pain in hell,” but no one has actually visited either place and come back to tell the tale. Instead, we all just rely on second-hand accounts from the Bible. A more devout author might argue that the Bible is a unique document, with a special claim to truth because it is derived from God, but Chaucer is characteristically irreverent and secular. Instead, he describes the Bible as akin to any other book, and argues that many other truths can similarly be found in literature.
Much of that literature is not Christian, but rather classical histories—the very classical histories that Chaucer uses as sources for the Legend. Like the afterlife, the distant past cannot be experienced directly, so we need to rely on written materials to know what happened. This gives secular literature heightened value, as a source of knowledge as well as entertainment. By citing classical literature as an important example of literature being a source of truth, and then retelling those stories in his own work, Chaucer positions the Legend as itself a valuable source of knowledge.
The Construction of History
In the Prologue, Chaucer stresses the value of literature as a source of knowledge. He implies that classical histories allow us to know about the past, even though we can’t experience it directly, in the same way that the Bible lets us know the truth about the afterlife. As we discuss in the previous theme, this claim helps Chaucer increase the prestige of the author by casting himself as a source of knowledge as well as entertainment. However, the Legend’s relationship to truth becomes more complicated as it continues.
On one hand, Chaucer never describes any explicitly fantastical events. The dream vision at the beginning of the poem is strange, and certainly seems too specific and extensive for a real dream, but we can’t say with certainty that it didn’t happen. Chaucer makes extensive use of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a source, but does not include any of the actual transformations. In Ovid’s version of the Philomela story, she transforms into a bird, whereas in Chaucer’s version, the story ends with her mourning in the arms of her sister. This realism makes it seem more possible that Chaucer is making claims about how things really happened in the past, rather than just telling stories with no relationship to history.
Yet Chaucer also shows his hand in how he tweaks history in accordance with the mission Cupid and Alceste assign him. He is supposed to write a series of stories about how women are faithful, but sometimes the “real” story is more complicated, as when Aeneas has to leave Dido in order to fulfill his destiny of founding Rome. Chaucer begins to describe Aeneas’s broader story, only to cut himself off and emphasize that he’s here only to tell us about his relationship with Dido. This deftly illustrates an important way that books can twist the truth. Rather than plainly making things up, the author can present only part of the truth, or one side of the story. The structure of the Legend thus emphasizes to its reader that the author has the power not only to pass on knowledge, but also to shape it.
Self-Destructive Love
The Legend is supposed to be a tribute to love. However, the love it depicts always ends in tragedy. Every one of the women ends up alone, and often dead. Conversely, the men who are unfaithful in love often go off to pursue heroic destinies. Tellingly, there is only one man in the Legend who Chaucer identifies as faithful in love—Pyramus.
Yet Pyramus’s death is needless and, honestly, a little silly. The story makes clear that Thisbe was only a short distance away, hiding in a cave, when Pyramus killed himself, thinking her dead. The dramatic irony enhances the pathos of the scene, but it also encourages the reader to see how easily the two could have lived. Rather than the inevitable result of a doomed union, their deaths would have been preventable with a little bit of forethought. Yet here, forethought and love seem mutually exclusive. It is the willingness to impale himself on his own sword without a moment’s hesitation that makes Pyramus such a passionate and faithful lover.
Though the narrator celebrates Pyramus’s decision, Chaucer’s framing of his foolish and unnecessary death as the only example of true male love in history suggests that true love is inherently self-destructive. Indeed, Alceste encourages Chaucer to write the Legend by promising that if he does so, he will be protected from the wound of Cupid’s arrow. The narrator might celebrate Pyramus’s decision, but he himself takes great pains to avoid the wound of love.
Male and Female Desire
Female desire is oddly absent from much of the Legend. Even though the women are the faithful lovers, it is men who are often depicted in the process of falling in love (or lust). Chaucer depicts Tereus and Tarquin’s rapes as motivated by the desire Philomela and Lucrece’s beauty and innocence provoke in them. Dido and Aeneas's more complicated relationship emerges from Aeneas’s desire for Dido’s beauty, power, wealth, and strength. When Chaucer first introduces Hipsipsyle, we see her almost as though with a lover’s eyes, as a young woman whose beauty emerges in concert with the sea-landscape she traverses.
One of the most famous stories from Chaucer’s beloved Canterbury Tales is The Wife of Bath’s Tale. In it, a man has to go on a lengthy quest just to learn what women really want. The plot points to a broader medieval anxiety around women’s desire. In the English Middle Ages, the majority of writers were male. These writers could portray the actions of women, because those could be observed, but how could they know women’s internal feelings, especially private feelings like desire? This was made more difficult because misogynistic norms barely saw women as human, meaning the gulf between men and women was seen as extreme. Furthermore, women’s desire was often seen as abnormal or destructive, unlike men’s desire, which was seen as natural and necessary. The inconsistency and incompleteness of the Legend can be read as a result of this fundamental uncertainty at the heart of the poem.
Parody of Hagiography
Hagiography, or stories about the lives of saints, was one of the most popular genres of the Middle Ages. The best-known work of hagiography was the Golden Legend by Jacob de Voragine, a massive work comprising hundreds of stories about saints from the time of Jesus through the early Roman years and into the Middle Ages. The stories follow a few highly repetitive formulas. One sub-genre was the virgin martyr—Christian women who take vows of chastity and choose to die rather than be married off.
The title The Legend of Good Women immediately invites comparison to the Golden Legend. The subtitle, “The Saints Legend of Cupid,” makes the parallel even more explicit. However, this is a pagan version of a quintessentially Christian genre. These women are saints of Cupid rather than Jesus; they die for their devotion to love rather than their devotion to Christian chastity. Nevertheless, by describing them as martyrs, Chaucer specifically encourages the audience to see these women as akin to the virgin martyrs of the Golden Legend.
Chaucer is famous for his irreverent attitude towards religion. We can sometimes imagine the Middle Ages as a period of religious fundamentalism, and it’s true that fourteenth-century England was a theocracy where Christianity was a prerequisite for citizenship. Yet there was also a surprising amount of room for experimentation and even humor in regards to religion. The Legend of Good Women, which was extremely popular during Chaucer’s time, is a perfect example. By comparing the women of the legend to saints, he implicitly acknowledges that the virgin martyrs were also suicides: though they did not kill themselves, they all chose death over marriage. The comparison ennobles the women of the Legend of Good Women, but it also makes the virgin martyrs appear a little less untouchably holy by comparing them to a cast of flawed women whose passion and desire lead them to self-destruction.
Duty and Personal Ethics
Many characters in the Legend are pulled in different directions by their obligations to family or lovers, on the one hand, and their personal moral codes, on the other. Aeneas wants to stay with Dido, but also feels an obligation to pursue his destiny and honor the memory of his warrior-father by leaving to conquer Rome. Ariadne betrays her father in order to save Theseus, because her personal ethics prevent her from allowing an innocent man to die. Hypemnestra’s father orders her to kill her husband, and she agrees out of duty to him, but at the crucial moment cannot bring herself to follow through.
Together, these incidents complicate the message of the Legend. Though the narrator repeatedly condemns men for leaving their lovers, the choice is not as simple as it first appears. In reality, many characters in the legend are navigating multiple obligations, and are left in situations where they will, no matter what, end up betraying someone. To Ariadne’s father, she is a traitor, not a heroine. To the people of Rome, Aeneas’s decision to leave Dido made him a hero willing to make difficult choices, rather than a false lover.
Yet there’s also a clear gendered dynamic at play. Although several women in the Legend navigate complicated situations, they all end up choosing their lovers over everything else. In the context of this particular collection of stories, this makes them faithful, but the motif also suggests that women make untrustworthy queens and daughters. They are confined to the role of loving, whereas men’s willingness to abandon their lovers enables them to be heroes, dutiful sons, and strong rulers. Thus, one of the poem’s most persistent strategies for praising women actually reasserts patriarchal values.
