Publisher's Synopsis
Medieval writers never seemed to tire of debating the nature of women: were they good or bad? Victims or shrews? Were they most truly represented by Dido, Penelope and Lucretia, or by Eve, Delilah and Clytemnestra? When Chaucer began to write, he was confronted with the problem of how "woman" was to be represented in terms that broke free of these traditional polarities, and even more importantly, with the problem of how she was to be evaluated for herself, rather than endlessly evaluated from the male standpoint implied in their formulation.;Jill Mann argues that Chaucer's solution to these problems was not to abandon his literary inheritance, but to absorb it into new structures that show these stereotypes in a new light, accepting that "woman" is no longer marginalized but becomes the centre of human values; the norm against which men are to be measured.
