Women Defended, Women Defamed: The Legend of Good Women, The Plowman from Bohemia, and The Little Weaver

Abstract

Scholars have long debated whether Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women was a serious attempt to praise noble women or a tongue-in-cheek deflation of the genre. Earlier criticism tended to dismiss it as an unsuccessful prelude to the more satisfactory The Canterbury Tales for which it was abandoned. With the rise of feminist criticism in the 1970s several serious attempts were made to grapple with the “woman’s question” in this most complex of texts. Generally speaking, critical opinion was divided between those scholars who regarded its vision of “good women” as ironic and those who saw it as well i mentioned and sincere. Inevitably, this question of authorial intention raised the even more complex problem of audience reception: was it conceived for a small audience of male initiates with whom Chaucer was sharing his ironic attitude to women or was it written for a female courtly audience and thus intended to dramatize the long-standing debate about women defended and women defamed with famous women of antiquity as the central protagonists?1