#49 The Legend of Good Women

This is my second Chaucer entry, and is a proper follow up to Troilus and Criseyde.  In the prologue Chaucer is visited by Alcestis who commands him to write a compilation of honest women, as opposed to the harlot Criseyde.  So as a good poet he gets to it, telling the stories of all the most famous women than anyone with a cursory knowledge of Ovid and Greek Mythology will immediately know.  The women are: Hippolyta, Medea, Dido, Cleopatra, Lucrece, Procne, Leander, and I am forgetting someone.  So he sets about in his task, and it becomes almost immediately clear he is not happy as a poet.  He constantly takes the women's words away with some flippant remark like, "It is too long to write, so I won't".  Watching him dredge through this ultimately incomplete work is rather funny.  Here the author has no creativity but to summarize and translate tales that are but common tales.  This is not Chaucer at his peak, except the prologue.  But at nearly 3,000 lines it is a rather lengthy work of trial.