In recognition of her prowess Ide is given the Emperor’s daughter in marriage, and cannot refuse the honor without dangerous offense to her overlord. The princess Olive is in love with her fiancé. Ide’s own emotions are not described—one of the author’s subtle devices for exploiting a piquant situation without involving his heroine in moral obliquity. Another is his weaving of an inescapable net of circumstance in preliminary chapters to prevent Ide’s either fleeing as a lone knight errant or returning to her father’s domains in her feminine role—the one course meant disgraceful death, the other involvement in incest. So the reader is free to follow with good conscience Ide’s submission to the marriage ceremony, her pretence of illness as excuse for inadequacy on the bridal night, and the unelaborated account of her attempt to satisfy her bride with “clyppynge and kyssynge” throughout the eight days of the wedding feast. When this technique is pursued for another week, however, the bride’s bitter grief forces Ide to confess her sex, and the confession, carried to the Emperor by an eavesdropping page, results in his decreeing that Ide be burned, “for he sayd he wold not suffre suche boggery to be used.” The fire is actually kindled before Ide’s frantic prayers to God and the Virgin save her (as Ovid’s Iphis was saved at the altar) by miraculous transformation into a man. Beyond a doubt considerable physical intimacy is implied here, though none so specific as in Martial or Lucian. And it appears that death was not an excessive penalty for such intimacy if wilfully indulged in, though again the mores reflected must be taken as a hybrid between those of the tenth century, in which the story was laid, and the thirteenth, in which it was written down.