ABSTRACT
The late medieval nobleman, suggests Richard Firth Green, 'was not content merely to experience the ennobling power oflove through the poet's imagination, he had himself to play the lover, to join with his fellows in an elaborate game of romantic make-believe.'l This 'love-play' was a social practice that helped provide cultural markers which further distinguished the aristocratic elite:
The Legend of Good Women is a poem that is more exclusively concerned with this elite and their 'play' than is the Parliament of Fowls. In the latter poem Chaucer introduced the concept of 'commune profit' through the narrator's reading of the Dream of Scipio, and then used courtly love conventions to suggest how society as a whole could achieve this political ideal. These ideas are still pertinent to the Legend of Good Women, but here Chaucer's political observations are more intimately connected to the way in which those who are ofthe court read and relate to the conventions of fin amor. It is therefore a poem that is more engaged with the way in which the aristocracy allowed literary conventions to inform their thinking and behaviour.
