It is with great pleasure that we present this special issue, “Looking Forward, Looking Back on the Legend of Good Women.” Guest editors Betsy McCormick, Leah Schwebel, and Lynn Shutters reject the idea that the Legend is an unsuccessful experiment. Instead, they assume that close examination of the text will display Chaucer's accomplishment, to which end they have assembled a superb group of scholars who read the Legend as a central work in Chaucer's exploration of women's emotional lives.
The subjects of this issue reflect the broad scope of twenty-first-century Chaucer study: they include prosody, classical and medieval source study, reception history, affect and emotion, and women's lived experience of love, marriage, and betrayal. Where much study of the Legend has focused on the variant F and G Prologues, the essays here direct attention to the individual women in individual legends. Carolyn Collette examines the details of the Legend...
