This book reads the Legend of Good Women as one of Chaucer's major texts, a thematically and artistically sophisticated poem whose veneer of transparency and directed focus mask a vital inquiry into the most basic questions of value and sincerity in a society increasingly aware of what Richard Firth Green has described as a crisis of trouthe. To do so it places Chaucer within a broad European intellectual context, at the intersection of translation and the development of the vernacular, recognizing his ‘Englished’ stories as part of humanist interest in stories of exemplary women's conduct, a paradoxical combination of ideal virtue, willing subordination and strength. His stories of womanhede, what he regarded as the essential female virtues of fidelity and generosity, helped shape a narrative tradition of stories of good women that have become increasingly popular and important sites for exploring subjectivity in relation to desire, ethics and the various pressures of social and political restraint in the early modern world. Chaucer wrote in a moment of literary and cultural hybridity, when love service and the courtly conventions of love poetry were consciously melded with a broader definition of love's ‘thousand formes’ (Tr III, l. 20), which not only unite humans sexually but also hold ‘regne and hous in unitee’ (Tr III, l. 29) and sustain friendship. This notion of love is closely linked to heightened attention to what French termed le bien commun and English termed comon profit in late fourteenth century vernacular literature.