The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception. Edited by Carolyn P. Collette. Chaucer Studies, 36. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006. Pp. xviii + 203. $85.

The once neglected Legend of Good Women has certainly been making up for lost time critically, and Carolyn P. Collette's new volume is a rigorous, substantial new contribution to our engagement with Chaucer's most allusive and elusive poem. Collette's introduction addresses the critical and textual issues that motivate her collection, acknowledging that feminist criticism, in and of itself, "has had limited success in opening up this text to new readings, perhaps because the theme of victimization so strongly structures the narratives that critics seem forced to fall back on stereotypical paradigms of weak women and predatory, controlling males" (p. ix). She then contextualizes the Legend in Chaucer's corpus and surveys the essays to follow, emphasizing the volume's major themes of audience, reception, and context, both historical and textual. The book looks in the right places for new readings of the poem, and new does not mean "novel," for even though Collette claims the essays read the poem from "different cultural perspectives" they often do much better than that phrase implies. The essays dig productively into under-explored literary and cultural contexts and occasions for the Legend, contexts that have not been apparent or available to students of the modern edited text. The people, personalities, events of Richard's reign come alive in these essays, as does Chaucer's involvement not only with poetic history but with his own world and time. Put another way, the essays Collette assembles, at their best, situate the poem in new ways, which are really old ways, bringing us closer to how it was produced, revised, received, and performed.

Michael Calabrese
California State University, Los Angeles