Thisbe Out of Context: Chaucer's Female Readers and the Findern Manuscript

Abstract

In the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, with its angry and hermeneutically challenged God of Love, its obsequious and misunder stood poet-narrator, and its generous queen Alceste, Chaucer poses the question: how did medieval audiences, particularly women, respond to representations of women in texts? One place to seek answers is in the reception history provided by manuscript evidence. The manuscript most frequently cited as evidence of female reaction to the Legend of Good Women is the Findern Manuscript, Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6, a fifteenthand sixteenth-century compilation of poetry that contains, among other texts, the excerpted Legend of Thisbe.1 The Findern MS has long been accepted as having been owned, read, and perhaps even partially compiled by women.2 Most recently, two scholars, Carol Meale and Nicola McDonald, have drawn conclusions from the contents of the Findern MS about women's