Sheila Delany's critical voice has been a powerful presence for the past three
decades-restive, aggressive, and intelligently committed to providing
historicized readings to a wide variety of medieval and early modern texts. The
publication of The Naked Text is thus a significant event, not only because another
major book from Delany has appeared, but because it focuses upon an important
and somewhat under-studied Chaucerian poem. Often skipped over in a typical
Chaucer survey, The Legend of Good Women is quite possibly Chaucer's most
straightforward take on the "woman question." With its dream-vision Prologue
focusing on the vocation of the poet, the Legend is a collection of classical female
vitae written putatively on command because of Chaucer's alleged misrepresentation of women in Troilus and Criseyde. These legends of "secular
saints" thus pose a basic question of considerable significance to readers of this
journal. Is Chaucer a friend of woman; or, as Delany puts it, does the Legend
"offer a new dignily to women, or is it more ofthe same old thing?" (p. 8).
Delany is in fact not very interested in answering questions such as these if they
are asked in political or cultural isolation. Rather, as she explains in her
"Prolocutory," her book is committed to unpacking the poem's overall
ideology-an ideology defined broadly enough so as to include such interrelated
issues as "sex and gender," "language and nature," "philosophy and theology,"
"reading and writing," "hagiography and classical literature," "English
intellectual life and English foreign policy" (p. 2). Delany's central metaphor is
the "naked text," a richly-defined term she deftly employs to explicate a variety
of Chaucerian stratagems: mostly notably, a philosophical position that uncovers
the constructedness of femininity and thus the "the impossibility of nakedness";
Sheila Delany's critical voice has been a powerful presence for the past three
decades-restive, aggressive, and intelligently committed to providing
historicized readings to a wide variety of medieval and early modern texts. The
publication of The Naked Text is thus a significant event, not only because another
major book from Delany has appeared, but because it focuses upon an important
and somewhat under-studied Chaucerian poem. Often skipped over in a typical
Chaucer survey, The Legend of Good Women is quite possibly Chaucer's most
straightforward take on the "woman question." With its dream-vision Prologue
focusing on the vocation of the poet, the Legend is a collection of classical female
vitae written putatively on command because of Chaucer's alleged misrepresentation of women in Troilus and Criseyde. These legends of "secular
saints" thus pose a basic question of considerable significance to readers of this
journal. Is Chaucer a friend of woman; or, as Delany puts it, does the Legend
"offer a new dignily to women, or is it more ofthe same old thing?" (p. 8).
Delany is in fact not very interested in answering questions such as these if they
are asked in political or cultural isolation. Rather, as she explains in her
"Prolocutory," her book is committed to unpacking the poem's overall
ideology-an ideology defined broadly enough so as to include such interrelated
issues as "sex and gender," "language and nature," "philosophy and theology,"
"reading and writing," "hagiography and classical literature," "English
intellectual life and English foreign policy" (p. 2). Delany's central metaphor is
the "naked text," a richly-defined term she deftly employs to explicate a variety
of Chaucerian stratagems: mostly notably, a philosophical position that uncovers
the constructedness of femininity and thus the "the impossibility of nakedness";
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