5 - The accusation

Summary

One of the great puzzles of the Legend of Good Women concerns why Chaucer should have embedded a major poetic manifesto in a speech embodying the characteristic concepts and terms of serious medieval political writing. For the purposes of my exposition it is expedient to abstract the discussion of the material of princely advice from that of the matter of poetry, but we should not ignore Chaucer's insistent implication of the one with the other.

Alceste's appeal for mercy to be shown to the poet wavers between viewing Love as a god and as a king, but the emphasis is heavily with the latter. The long speech reveals a close familiarity with the major types of writing favoured in late medieval England in the mode of a de regimine principum, that genre in which a man of learning presented his king with traditional advice on how to rule himself and his kingdom wisely. Treatises of this type abounded from antiquity, with a resurgence of new such works in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries after the rediscovery of Aristotle. Many medieval kings owned their own copy of the Secretum Secretorum or some other de regimine, or had their own vernacular translation made.