In the preceding pages I have sought to bring Chaucer's presentation of love and marriage into meaningful relation with contextual evidence of late medieval ideology and practice. My focus has ranged from the broad impact of particular texts to minutiae such as why a child appears in the garden in the Shipman's Tale, and from polite flirtation to the daily responsibilities of medieval wives. I have argued that Chaucer's presentation of these subjects is far richer, and makes more sense, if we read it with an appreciation of contemporary expectations, habits of behaviour, and tensions between values and practices. The conclusions that we can draw about late medieval customs and ideologies from letter collections and advice literature can be applied to Chaucer's work as a proxy for those ‘horizons of expectation’ that Chaucer's contemporary readers would have brought to his texts, and which he relied on them to bring in order for the meaning of his texts to be fully realised.

This approach helps us to understand characters' behaviour as either shocking or conventional: this throws light on Dorigen's grief for her absent husband in the Franklin's Tale, which would have seemed predictable to Chaucer's audience, as well as showing up the outrageous flouting of conventions of prudent behaviour in The Legend of Good Women. It contributes to our sense of the overall aims of a text like the Man of Law's Tale, where Chaucer's repeated references to common unhappy experiences of marriage suggest that he is trying to engage his readers' involvement in the Tale's message of the unreliability of worldly joy rather than create a detached, ironic attitude towards sentimental hagiography.