Abstract
This article creates a thought experiment considering how Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pizan use the larger cultural milieu of the Debate about Women as something “good to think with.” Whereas critics have often approached the Legend of Good Women (ca. 1386) and Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405) as examples of how authors in the Debate tradition rewrote women's stories to make bad women good, this article applies recent work in cognitive science, which studies how humans create categories, to argue that both Chaucer and Christine are thinking beyond taxonomic categories to depict their “good women” as active participants in an ethical inquiry. Using ad hoc categories to enact the extreme ideals of the Debate, both authors demonstrate that such an overly active constancy is the opposite of reason. Ultimately, they reveal that a too-constant female good proves, paradoxically, to be both destructive and disloyal.
