The Legend of Good Women (Medieval Texts and Studies)

The long-awaited critical edition of Chaucer's text brings together, for the first time, full manuscript variants and the results of recent paliographical and codicological work. The editors address the problem of distinguishing between authorial and scribal variation, and the results of this examination challenge traditional theories about Chaucer as a reviser. The Legend of Good Women is a poem in the form of a dream vision; the third longest of Chaucer's works and is possibly the first significant work in English to use the iambic pentameter or decasyllabic couplets, which he later used throughout the Canterbury Tales.