Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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This is the F-version Prologue to Chaucer's *The Legend of Good Women* (ca. 1380s–90s), a Middle English dream vision in the courtly love tradition. The prologue opens with a philosophical meditation on the authority of books: since no living person can verify heaven or hell firsthand, we must trust written records, and Chaucer positions himself as a devoted, humble reader who gleans what greater poets have left behind. This bookish piety gives way to an extended, almost obsessive celebration of the daisy — the narrator abandons his studies every May to watch the flower open at dawn and close at dusk, framing it as his spiritual sovereign. The poem then shifts into dream vision: falling asleep in a meadow, the narrator sees the God of Love arrive with a queen crowned to resemble a daisy, followed by a vast procession of history's faithful women in love (Cleopatra, Dido, Thisbe, Hero, and others), all of whom are declared inferior to this queen. The prologue's distinctive move is its self-conscious literary positioning: Chaucer presents himself as a latecomer harvesting scraps from earlier poets, while the God of Love's stern gaze implies the narrator is about to be charged with writing against women — setting up the whole collection as a court-ordered penance to celebrate heroic female fidelity.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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