There is a subtle interaction between how we read a writer’s work and the nature of the myth – to use no better word – current of that writer. Mary Flannery’s work has addressed the issue of reputation’s force in several areas, from her John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame (Reference Flannery2012) to her Reference Flannery2019 study, Practising Shame: female honour in the literature of medieval England, which discussed good and bad reputations for women in medieval writing and their emotional consequences.

Her new book, in Reaktion’s series ‘Medieval Lives’, has a title that, although initially somewhat off-putting unless you guess its ironic reference to Addison’s description of Chaucer, again suggests the interaction of one of the most profound and accomplished of all European writers with the diminished and still too common picture of him as a mere teller of bawdy stories. This is discussed in the book with economy and skill, and in so doing takes the reader through the known facts of Chaucer’s life and social relationships and fits his works into a plausible chronology. This discussion highlights the interaction between a writer, his situation in his context and what he writes – and the importance to him of the immediate reception, the details of which we now can never fully know. Thus, to overstate somewhat, later readers read a different work by a different poet. To see Chaucer as a ‘merry bard’ – as was for so long the default position (producing, for example, some regrettable pastiche verse by Addison’s sometime friend Alexander Pope) – privileges a very few of his Canterbury Tales over a great deal of the writing – especially what Chaucer calls The Book of Troilus – on which rested his reputation in the century or so after his death.

The book is beautifully produced with well-chosen, helpful illustrations, some as colour plates and some deftly inserted into the text. Its eight chapters take the reader through Chaucer’s personal and professional lives (as far as we can know them) and the major events that would have affected a man living in a society very much smaller and more intimate than anything of which we can conceive. He was never far away from the great events, but Mary Flannery rightly points out how rarely we glimpse them in his work. (That is not the case with his contemporary John Gower, to whom he gives the accolade of the adjective ‘moral’ at the end of The Book of Troilus.) Later chapters look not only at his development as a poet but also at how he has been reimagined in times nearer to our own: the maker of a high literary language, a proto-Reformer, a bard of high lineage and connections (his granddaughter was, after all, Countess of Suffolk), the merry, bawdy bard, the quarry of philologists and, more recently, the proto-feminist and the sceptic in religion. All of these are to some degree ‘true’, but none is the whole truth. Great poetry reads its readers, quite as much as the other way round.

This is not a book intended for specialists, but it is clearly written by one who is very much au fait with recent work both contextual and critical. For example, the vexed issue of Cecilia de Chaumpaigne’s releasing Chaucer from a charge de raptu meo has been put in a new context by discussion of the implications of documents, discovered in 1993 and 2019, in a special issue of Chaucer Review (2022, 57(4)). This is expertly summarised. On the other hand, discussion of the Wilton Diptych recognises its importance in Richard ii’s narrative of kingship, and his extraordinary ideological claims, but seems not fully to take account of Dillian Gordan’s (Reference Gordan1994) Making and Meaning: the Wilton Diptych. Those extreme claims must have been unignorable in the last decade of Chaucer’s life by anyone who had any entrée to the Court. But this is to cavil: the discussion of the poems that have come down to us (some early work, possibly in French in a culture that for most of Chaucer’s lifetime was trilingual, is certainly lost) is surefooted and economical.

Therein lies this book’s greatest strength. I would recommend it to any reader new to Chaucer and medieval studies, and it would be ideal for any undergraduate tackling for the first time a great medieval poet for the reading of whom their education so far has lamentably given them no preparation whatsoever. All the quotations from Middle English are translated, and Mary Flannery’s love and admiration for Chaucer are palpable. It is a very succinct and well-balanced point de depart for further, more extensive studies, which may well be the consequence of its infectious enthusiasm.