Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women by Carolyn Collette (review)

Since the 1988 publication of Florence Percival’s Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women, scholarship on Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women has mainly flourished in journal articles, edited collections, and monograph chapters. Carolyn Collette’s new book participates in the current drive in shorter Legend scholarship to connect Chaucer’s poem to international cultural movements; the longer length positions her to address multiple contexts, connecting them and the Legend to the rest of Chaucer’s work. Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women is structured as “an explication of possible foci all drawn from the dynamic literary culture which gives rise to the Legend and which the Legend in turn helps to shape” (p. 9). Collette aims to show “how Chaucer’s persistent interest in women in love, marriage and polity not only shapes the canon of his work but also links him to the larger literary culture of late medieval court poetry” (p. 155).

Collette’s five chapters delineate several “possible foci”—that is, potentially fruitful avenues and contexts—for future study of the Legend of Good Women. Each chapter takes as its focus a different kind of literary context. Three contexts are external: fourteenth-century English humanism in the circle of Richard de Bury (Chapter One); contemporary French, English, and Italian humanist treatments of the nine Legend of Good Women heroines (Chapter Two); and the burgeoning late-medieval interest in Aristotelian philosophy (Chapter Three). The final two chapters situate the Legend of Good Women in the development of Chaucer’s thinking: Chapter Four discusses thematic continuities with Troilus and Criseyde, and Chapter Five examines how Chaucer continues to explore the same themes in the Canterbury Tales. Collette is explicitly uninterested in arguing in favor of one context or approach; rather, she presents the three external contexts as synchronous, and her final two chapters occasionally draw upon them.

Of these contexts for thinking about the Legend of Good Women, the English humanism in Chapter One and the Aristotelian philosophy in Chapter Three are more unfamiliar in Legend scholarship. In Chapter One, Collette briefly introduces the literary and philosophical careers of several men in the circle of Richard de Bury: Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, Richard FitzRalph, and Robert Holcot. De Bury, in particular, she argues, anticipates themes that Chaucer explores in the Legend, the Astrolabe, and Troilus and Criseyde: love of books as repositories of wisdom and sources of information; the definition of entente and the ethical questions it raises; and the “slippages of language and intention” (p. 30) that entangle the medieval maker-translator. In Chapter Three, Collette reads each individual legend through the lens of Aristotle via Nicholas Oresme’s French translation, showing how Chaucer uses the stories in the Legend to explore, from a variety of angles, two Aristotelian concepts: the need to strive for a balance between emotional deficiency and excess, and the inherent tension generated in relationships when one party’s motives spring from deceit, utility, or pleasure. To this Aristotelian set of issues, she suggests, Chaucer adds his own interest in “why people break faith, why exchanges are not honored, covenants broken” (p. 114). Collette does not claim that either de Bury and his circle or Oresme are direct sources for Chaucer’s work. Instead, she uses them to delineate the contemporary relevance of issues and themes that Chaucer addresses in the Legend of Good Women, so as to entice further scholarly inquiry. Witness, for instance, her tantalizing yet unexplored suggestion in Chapter One that Robert Holcot’s commentary on the Book of Wisdom contains exemplary lives of pagan and classical women possibly similar to what Boccaccio and Chaucer would later create. Likewise, in Chapter Three, she briefly notes that in the manuscripts of Oresme’s translation of the Ethics produced under Oresme’s supervision, the Aristotelian mean is depicted in illuminations as a queen. Such suggestive but largely unexplored asides are gifts to fellow scholars.

Chapters Two, Four, and Five address contexts...