“Charitable and trewe”: Multiplicity, Prudence, and Pity in the Prologue of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women

Abstract

ABSTRACT Chaucer's Legend of Good Women stages the criticism feared by Chaucer's previous narrators through the literary creation of the God of Love. A combination of criticism and reevaluation forms the genesis of the poem and becomes its major theme. The Legend demonstrates the need for rereading and simultaneously demands rereading from its audience. Chaucer challenges the cramped constraints given by the God of Love by offering, through Alceste, a model of a complex and dialogical form of poetry that educates a reader in pity and repentance, virtues aimed at prudential action.