Chaucer's Proleptic Palinode

Abstract:Chaucer intervenes in late medieval debates about the dangers of fictive mimesis by reimagining the unanticipated woman reader's role in the repentant narrative of the vita Ovidiana. To defend the Ars amatoria from accusations of immorality, Ovid had claimed that it had been misinterpreted by women readers he had not anticipated. The medieval Ovid tradition absorbed this feminized figure into the biography it retroactively constructed for him; the Heroides became a palinode, an apology for or corrective to the youthful poetic indiscretions that supposedly misled these women readers. Chaucer turns this tradition knowingly on its head. In Troilus and Criseyde, he not only sets the stage for his own Heroides by giving himself something to apologize for, but also revalues the unanticipated woman reader and her interpretive faults. His sustained engagement with the vita Ovidiana in turn elucidates the literary-theoretical stakes of The Legend of Good Women, which defends the ethical value of narrative fiction, without moralizing commentary, even as it asks the reader to remain alert to its risks.