The Naked Text: Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women”

A sequel to her seminal book on Chaucer’s House of Fame , Sheila Delany’s elegant and innovative study of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women explores what it meant to be a reader and a writer, and to be English and a courtier, in the late fourteenth century. The richness of late medieval art, philosophy, and history are powerfully brought to bear on one of Chaucer’s most controversial works. So too are the insights of modern critical theory—semiotics, historicism, and gender studies especially—making this a unique achievement in medieval and Chaucerian studies.

Delany’s strikingly original readings of Chaucer’s Orientalism, his sexual wordplay, his theological attitudes, and his treatment of sex and gender have given us a Chaucer for our time.