"Other Smale Ymaad Before": Chaucer as Historiographer in the Legend of Good Women

Abstract

���� ��� The detailed instructions that Chaucer’s narrator in the Legend of Good Women receives from Alceste and the God of Love are usually reduced to their simplest form by critics: tell of good women who were true in loving and of the men who betrayed them, shorten the stories to their most important details, and begin with Cleopatra. 1 One detail of the God of Love’s instructions to the narrator, however, deserves closer attention: namely, that the God of Love tells the narrator to write about Alceste “Whan thou hast other smale ymaad before” (F 550), or “Whan thow hast othere smale mad byfore” (G 540). 2 “Smale” what? The God of Love does not specify legends, and the stories themselves seem to fit both the hagiographic schema of a saints’ legendary and that of an Ovidian-style collection of the “olde appreved stories” (F 21). 3 I suggest that Chaucer intends the word “smale” to leave open several possible definitions, rather than close off meanings, and that one lens through which his audience would read the short stories that follow would be the tradition of the English historiographers. 4 Just as Walter Map claims to write “trifles” of history in his De nugis curialium, Chaucer plays on the multiple meanings of smale: not only ‘of small size’ and ‘little in amount,’ but also ‘of little value,’ ‘of low estate,’ ‘trivial,’ and ‘less important.’ 5 In fact, the legends are designed to be “smale” in a way that echoes several earlier historiographers (and some authors of saints’ legends) who use metaphors to question subtly the validity of their own sources. In one sense, saints’ legends, classical stories, and such smaller stories as origin legends for a monastery are all variations on the same theme, since all could fit under the overarching category of historical writing. 6 By starting with the undeniably historical figure of Cleopatra, Chaucer adopts a structure that allows him to mimic these writers of “trifles” of history in a way that comments on the writing process itself. As Helen Cooper has recently reminded us, Chaucer is “a poet who, whenever he came to a fork in the road, went both ways” (her emphasis). 7