This book has put the case for reading the Legend of Good Women within a series of contexts that suggest its close ties to major intellectual and artistic developments in late fourteenth century European culture. A fragmentary text at once clear about its theme and yet often seemingly at odds with its announced purposes, the poem is a challenge to reconcile with the success of its apparent predecessor Troilus and Criseyde and its putative successor The Canterbury Tales, with which it has strong links. As I said in my introduction to this volume, the purpose of this book is not to argue for one or another interpretation of the Legend, but rather to suggest lines of inquiry that lead to a richer understanding of how the poem fits into the pattern of Chaucer's artistic development and how it reflects the styles, modes and themes of the time in which it was created. What I have tried to show is how Chaucer's persistent interest in women in love, marriage and polity not only shapes the canon of his work but also links him to the larger literary culture of late medieval court poetry.

In the Legend of Good Women Chaucer has created his own version of a major fourteenth-century literary genre: the collection of exemplary tales of women told for moral and ethical purposes. In its very conception this genre is drawn from books, particularly from histories of the classical past. In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt distinguishes the classicizing of earlier medieval culture from early humanism by observing that while the humanists mistakenly asserted they had rediscovered classical literature, what they had really discovered was its alterity, discovered that ‘something that had seemed alive was really dead’.