SOURCE: “‘If That Thou Live’: Legends and Lives of Good Women,” in Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy, Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 337-78.

In the following essay, Wallace investigates the parallels between Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, and the works of his Italian humanist predecessors, Boccaccio and Petrarch, who similarly presented ancient and classical lives. In particular, Wallace examines the way in which Chaucer, like his predecessors, operated as both a poet and a political subject, maintaining that, unlike Petrarch, who spoke from several “feminized” positions within his work when dealing with masculine rulers, Chaucer situates an “eloquent wife” between himself and the dominant masculine figure of his social world.

Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, particularly its “Prologue,” shares the “Monk's Tale”'s interest in the dynamics of kingship and despotism but locates itself, in de casibus terms, before the fall. And, like...