that throughout the narratives, Chaucer makes reference to his predominantly female audience and even questions them in the piece itself. These pagan mythological characters whose stories all include love and betrayal could serve as warnings and cautionary tales to the poem’s female readers. McDonald also speculates that some of the text might serve as “motherly advice” to young women on how they should act and think properly during that time period which would also support the idea that this poem was meant for a female audience. Because it was controversial during that time period to show individualism, especially for women, Chaucer’s style of writing in The Legend of Good Women could be read as both conservative and radical depending on who was reading it. Although this series of poems seems to be about the legends of these women and their difficulties with love, it has a political undertone that points to the controversial topic of individualism. Helen Phillips writes that Chaucer uses a specifically “amorous” tone in these poems to veil this controversy, while adding in political jargon to these otherwise unpolitical stories to still suggest this underlying topic. Most likely the female audience would have read this story as a satire rather than as an informational story on how they should act, which is how the male audience would have read the poem. So, the women played an important role in interpreting this piece in the way that Chaucer intended. Bibliography Arner, Lynn. Chapters 4 and 5 of Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013. Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson et al., Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987, pp. 587–630. Delany, Sheila, The Naked Text: Chaucer's Legend of Good Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 Kiser, Lisa, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the 'Legend of Good Women". Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Percival, Florence, Chaucer's Legendary Good Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. References External links The Legend of Good Women as published by the Oxford University Press in 1900. Legend of Good Women a free translation and retelling, in modern English prose, of Chaucer's narrative poem recounting the lives of many brave and virtuous women in classical history, mythology and legend. Poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer Middle English poems Visionary poems Mock-heroic English poems Biographical dictionaries of women Cultural depictions