SOURCE: Winstead, Karen A. “‘I am al othir to yow than yee weene’: Hoccleve, Women, and the Series.” Philological Quarterly 72, no. 2 (1993): 143-55.

In this essay, Winstead addresses the question of whether Hoccleve's praise of women is genuine or satiric, focusing on two poems from the Series, “Jereslaus's Wife” and “Jonathas and Fellicula.” Winstead considers the role of the bumbling narrator, whose “praise” of women may effectively function as criticism.

In 1399, Christine de Pisan began her assault on the misogynistic writings that were so popular in late medieval Europe with her Epistre au dieu d'amours, a poem in which Cupid defends women against what Christine considered the defamation of their sex by Jean de Meun and other male authors.¹ Only three years later, the English Chaucerian Thomas Hoccleve produced an adaptation of the Epistre, the “Letter of Cupid.”² Unlike Christine's poem, which scholars regard as a straightforward defense of...