Presented as tales of women's fidelity in love, the nine legends of good women tell other, more complex stories about the danger of lust and of loving, of the insidious nature of deception masquerading as benign intent, and of the paradoxical dangers inherent in generosity – for both giver and recipient. Such perennial issues of social and moral behavior were rendered highly visible and highly topical by the popularity of Aristotle's Politics and Ethics in the learned secular culture of late medieval Europe. The Ethics in particular, with its explication of the value of moderation and the psychological dynamics of gift exchange, provides a rich context in which to understand Chaucer's larger project in the Legend. The previous chapter surveyed how other major late medieval writers adapted stories of faithful and betrayed women for various instructional and thematic purposes. In this chapter I want to lay out some lines of thinking about what ends Chaucer's versions of the same stories might have served. I propose that the stories draw attention through theme and narrative pacing to the virtues of moderation, the dangers of emotional extremes, and to broken covenants, and their effects on individuals and on the larger community. The intellectual matrix in which Chaucer and his literary contemporaries created their poetry valorized Aristotelian ideas of social and political virtue – reason, moderation, alignment of intention, word and deed: all contributed to the idea of bien commun, the comon profit of Chaucer's English.