Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women by Florence Percival (review)

REVIEWS FLORENCE PERCIVAL. Chaucer's Legendary Good Women. Cambridge Stud­ ies in Medieval Literature 38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. 338. $69.95. Scholars often consider Chaucer's Legend ofGood Women to be a text that marks Chaucer's rejection of the court and its literary productions. How­ ever diverse their interpretations of the Legend ultimately may be, such critics as Robert Frank, Elaine Hansen, and Lee Patterson all concur that Chaucer registers in the poem his desire for liberation from the aristocratic discourse offin amor. The Legend constitutes for these readers a kind of bridge text in Chaucer's literary career, a work that segues from court-identified pieces such as the Troilus to the sort of writing exemplified by The Canterbury Tales. In Chaucer's Legendary Good Women, Florence Percival offers a different take on the Legend, which for her does not reject but instead embraces the court and, in particular, its invest­ ment in ludic debate over Woman. Taking as her topic Chaucer's self­ authorization as a vernacular writer, Percival emphasizes the status of the Legend as a palinode that brilliantly participates in a tradition of recreational courtly debate interested not in taking a stand per se on the question of female fidelity, but in playfully exploiting "the competing interests of the disputants" (p. 3). For Percival, readers for whom Chaucer takes a stand on the topic of female virtue are missing the point. The "surface of the text," admits Percival, "is cheerfully biased" against woman, as the medieval "joke hinted at" in the poem is that while we may dream of good women, "in practice none was likely to be found" (p. 15; p. 7). Yet above all, for Percival, "the fictional debate about women is only an excuse to discuss the poetic craft" and display Chaucer's literary prowess (p. 11). Chaucer's seeming defense of Woman is really a defense of Chaucer, a "declaration of the English poet's own sense of worth and social value" as a court writer (p. 13). Aiming to provide the reader with an understanding of how the Legend would have resonated within the courtly milieu for which it was written, Percival offers a wide-ranging account of both the Prologue and the Legends in light of their historical and literary con­ texts. The organization of the poem itself roughly dictates the ordering of Percival's book, which begins with two sections on the Prologue and spends the bulk of its second half on six Legends (those of Ariadne, 523 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Medea, Cleopatra, Dido, Lucrece, and Phyllis).The question of Chau­ cer's authorial self-fashioning dominates Percival's initial discussion of the Prologue.A reading of the daisy motif against the work ofMachaut, Froissart, and others suggests Chaucer's self-conscious insertion of his vernacular poetry into the illustrious Marguerite literary tradition; con­ sideration of the Alceste myth in light of its analogues demonstrates the richness and originality of Chaucer's legendary goddess; and, finally, analysis ofAlceste's defense ofChaucer demonstrates how the writer uses the goddess to craft himselfas at once a learned poet possessed "of social responsibility" and a grand translateur (p.129).A proximate second to the theme ofChaucer as author is that of Chaucer's ironic stance toward female virtue in the Prologue.In chapter 3, for example, Percival points to a "climate of scepticism" in the opening that qualifies the poet's out­ right praise of the daisy and Alceste (p.68).What is hinted at, for Perci­ val, in the first twenty-eight lines of the Prologue, becomes manifest later in the "flippant" tone the narrator assumes with regard to the ques­ tion ofbelieving "more than one can see or prove," namely that "cardinal tenet of courtly orthodoxy, la louange des dames" (pp.68-69). Contra H.C.Goddard's critics, Percival cites evidence from Lydgate and other fifteenth-century poets to demonstrate that "no anachronism need at­ rach to the suggestion that Chaucer is proposing ...sympathy with the ordinary man whose everyday experience leads him to be sceptical about the faithfulness of women" (p.73).In a similar vein, chapter 4 situates the ambiguities...