Chaucer's best-known poem, The Canterbury Tales, is justly celebrated for its richness and variety, both literary - the Tales include fabliaux, romances, sermons, hagiographies, fantasies, satires, treatises, fables and exempla - and thematic, with its explorations of courtly love and scatology, piety and impiety, chivalry and pacifism, fidelity and adultery. Students new to Chaucer will find in this Companion a lively introduction to the poem's diversity, depth, and wonder. Readers returning to the Tales will appreciate the chapters' fresh engagement with (...) the individual tales and their often complicated critical histories, inflected in recent decades by critical approaches attentive to issues of gender, sexuality, class, and language. (shrink)

Giving advice to Henry Bolingbroke was a pastime that could be very rewarding or very dangerous. Consider the following two cases. In May 1401, a little over nineteen months after Henry had deposed his cousin Richard and ascended the throne, his friend and confessor Philip Repyngdon, at that time the abbot of St. Mary de Prè in Leicester and chancellor of Oxford, sent Henry a long letter about the condition of the realm. Henry had personally requested such a report, according (...) to the version of the letter preserved in Adam of Usk's Chronicle: “Whereas your singular serenity did require of me, the least of your servants, when last I went out from before you with heavy heart, that, if I should hear aught adverse, I should make it known unto your excellency without delay, now, as your most obedient servant, do I take my pen in hand to show what I have heard and seen.” And Repyngdon had apparently heard and seen a lot, as he claimed that “law and justice are banished from the realm; thefts, murders, adulteries, fornications, extortions, oppressions of the poor, hurts, wrongs, and much reproach, are rife; and one tyrant will doth serve for law.”. (shrink)