ABSTRACT
The construction of woman as Other would seem the obvious target in a work so fitly titled for that purpose as the Legend of Good Women (1386). Elsewhere 1 I have argued that the socio-literary construction of gender is what Chaucer aims to deconstruct in his Legend, through a variety of rhetorical means and in the service of an ultimate (that is, historically unattainable but nonetheless “true”) genderlessness such as that offered by St. Paul in his remonstrance to the Galatians, or by Augustine in his vision of the resurrection:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Jesus Christ.
(Galatians 3:28)For my part, they seem to be wiser who make no doubt that both sexes shall rise [at resurrection]. For there shall be no lust, which is now the cause of confusion. From those bodies, then, vice shall be withdrawn, while nature shall be preserved. And the sex of a woman is not a vice, but nature. It shall then indeed be superior to carnal intercourse and child-bearing; nevertheless the female members shall remain adapted not to the old uses but to a new beauty, which, so far from provoking lust, now extinct, shall excite praise to the wisdom and clemency of God, who both made what was not and delivered from corruption what He made.
(City of God , 22.17)