The Logic of Obscenity in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women

When some thirty years ago Helge Kokeritz opened the discussion of Chaucer’s puns, he was careful to stress the continuity of the rhetorical tradition in which Chaucerian word play participates. From the late-classical treatise Ad Herennium to the high mediaeval antes of Geoffroi de Vinsauf and John of Garland, various sorts of word-play were recommended. They were also, of course, common practice in Latin and French mediaeval poetry, including many of Chaucer's favoured sources. Indeed the work of Roger Dragonetti suggests that pun can be seen as a linguistic manifestation of a trait fundamental to mediaeval thought: the analogic epistemology that searches out resemblances among things, or between things and qualities. It is a theological tradition, this conjuncture of disjunctive things, whose model can be found m the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville.