A Companion to Chaucer

This reference work is organized not in sections on each of Chaucer’s works, but in a series of 29 thematic chapters arranged alphabetically, from “Afterlife” to “Women”. The editor feared “alienating users with an over‐familiar approach” and considered that it would be “more exciting to foreground issues and themes”. Its ambition appears in the opening paragraphs, in which Brown evokes those famous literary companions, Scipio Africanus, Virgil, and Lady Philosophy; Brown hopes to avoid their “worst shortcomings” while providing “stimulating advice and guidance; to identify the terms of current debates …; to demonstrate how, in practice, particular ideas and theories...