7 - The Legend of Good Women

Summary

Like much of Chaucer's oeuvre, Chaucer's Legend of Good Women cannot be certainly dated and survives only in an incomplete form. Both factors bear on the larger issues of the poem's interpretation.

Certain references in the text provide evidence for the date of the poem's composition. The chief of these is in the F version of the Prologue to the Legend, where the narrator/poet is directed by the God of Love: 'whan this book ys maad, yive it the quene, / On my byhalf, at Eltham or at Sheene' (F 496-7). Since Eltham and Sheen were actual royal palaces, the 'quene' can only be Anne of Bohemia, wife of Richard II. Anne died in 1394 and the palace at Sheen was then destroyed. In the unique G version of the Prologue, these lines are omitted. The general scholarly assumption has been that g is the later of the two versions, and postdates Anne's death. The most obvious alternative to explain the omission of any mention of Anne in the G version is to assume it predates Richard's marriage to her in 1382. This is not impossible, but since the work involves an experiment with a related series of short narratives, it is tempting to suppose it is close in chronological sequence to the Canterbury Tales, which seems largely to date from the second half of the 1380s. The question, like so much else in Chaucerian chronology, remains unresolvable in any final way.