The Legend Of Good Women

The Legend Of Good Women
by Geoffrey Chaucer

Download Book
(Respecting the intellectual property of others is utmost important to us, we make every effort to make sure we only link to legitimate sites, such as those sites owned by authors and publishers. If you have any questions about these links, please contact us.)

link 1

About Book

From Library Journal
Good women, and men interested in women in literature but not familiar with Middle English, will welcome this book. Other translations, like this one accurate and readable, are available; but the advantage of McMillan's is her introduction. She situates the poem historically, compares it to sources and analogues, explains the conventions of the catalogue tradition, and explicates the text, thus rendering Chaucer's work more accessible to general readers. Specialists will find McMillan's views both historically aware and shaped by recent feminist scholarship. An excellent bibliographical essay adds to the value of this first-rate work. Margaret Hallissy, English Dept., Long Island Univ., C.W. Post Ctr., Greenvale, N.Y.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
Edited by Walter W. Skeat. This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1889 edition by the Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Language Notes
Text: English

Download Description
Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido and more.

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Dream-vision by Geoffrey Chaucer, written in the 1380s. The fourth and final work of the genre that Chaucer composed, it presents a "Prologue" (existing in two versions) and nine stories. In the "Prologue" the god of love is angry at Chaucer for writing about so many women who betray men. As penance, Chaucer is instructed to write about good women. The stories--concerning such women of antiquity as Cleopatra, Dido, and Lucrece--are brief and rather mechanical, with the betrayal of women by wicked men as a regular theme. As a result, the whole becomes more a legend of bad men than of good women.

Comments

SEND A COMMENT

PLEASE READ: All comments must be approved before appearing in the thread; time and space constraints prevent all comments from appearing. We will only approve comments that are directly related to the article, use appropriate language and are not attacking the comments of others.