It is only a few months ago that we brought before the notice of our readers Professor Skeat's edition of the
Minor Poems of Chaucer, and now we have the pleasure of welcoming an edition of Chaucer's
Legend of Good Women, the work of the same indefatigable scholar. Professor Skeat infers from various notices in other poems of Chaucer, and from internal evidence, that the present poem was begun in the spring of 1385, so that it was the immediate precursor of
The Canterbury Tales. In the Introduction to the
Man of Lawes Prologue Chaucer expressly refers to this poem, which he is pleased to call "the saintes legende of Cupide," i. e. the Legend of Cupid's Saints.
The poem consists of a succession of tales, and each tale relates the story of some woman famous in love. We are able to infer from lists in two other poems of Chaucer, that the poet's plan was to write the stories of Alcestis and of nineteen other women; but long before he had completed the plan he grew tired of the task, and at last gave it up in the middle of a sentence. Instead of twenty stories we have in the present poem only ten, written in nine Legends. The names of the ten holy martyrs of love are Cleopatra, Thisbe of Babylon, Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucretia, Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra. Professor Skeat thinks that we may be quite sure that such stories of " martyred" women were suggested by Ovid's Heroides, and Boccaccio's book entitled De Claris Mulicribus, a work containing 105 tales of illustrious women, briefly told in Latin prose. Hence no doubt the title of Chaucer's poem, The Legend of Good Women.
--The Oxford Magazine, Vol. 8.
