Robert J. Meyer-Lee's Literary Value and Social Identity in “The Canterbury Tales” is a very welcome addition to recent scholarship on how Chaucer's social identities and professional networks influenced his writing. The monograph joins Paul Strohm's Social Chaucer, David Carlson's Chaucer's Jobs, Elizabeth Fowler's Literary Character, Craig Bertolet's Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London, and Marion Turner's Chaucer: A European Life in providing a more clear and more complicated view of Chaucer's literary production as it relates to his working life. Working from the Clerk's, Merchant's, Squire's, and Franklin's tales, Meyer-Lee provides a strong argument for regarding these four tales as a cohesive sequence while offering insightful analysis of each narrative performance. In so doing, he asks his readers to reconsider critical assumptions about the relationship between tale and teller, Chaucer's process for composing and compiling his Canterbury Tales, and how the value of any literary enterprise might be determined.

The book begins with Meyer-Lee correcting a long-standing editorial error that divided the Clerk's, Merchant's, Squire's, and Franklin's tales into two fragments (4 and 5) and has kept readers from considering the four tales as part of a unified sequence. The rest of the book's introduction and its subsequent chapters demonstrate how this sequence foregrounds Chaucer's “anxiety about the value of his writing and of literary fiction in particular” by “collect[ing] within it the very four pilgrims whose social identities most overlap with those several identities that characterized his own social experience” (2–3). These overlapping identities and the links between the narrative performances, both textual and thematic, form the basis for Meyer-Lee's “axiological” analysis of this sequence, a methodological approach that supports the book's thesis “that any ascription of literary value necessarily occurs as a mediation of other ascriptions of value” (13).

Meyer-Lee frames his analysis through consideration of literary axiology, “a tale's implicit or explicit theory of its own value” (15); the axiological person, which defines an individual's “embodied constellation of values” (15); and Chaucer's axiological apologia, which is his term for “the literary self-justification Chaucer articulates in each stage of the 4–5 sequence” by assigning these tales to tellers with whom Chaucer “shares some amount of social overlap” (20). Meyer-Lee's careful unpacking of these axiologies in each chapter of the monograph demonstrates that neither a tale's meaning nor its claims on literary value can be determined by considering any particular aspect of a narrator's social identity or with reference to the information presented in the pilgrim's portrait. A more complex and nuanced understanding of how these identities and values emerge in response to social, political, economic, and personal concerns provides greater opportunities for appreciating the dynamics of the tale-telling contest and the individual tales assigned to particular speakers.

Each of the book's four chapters provides a fascinating examination of these tales that engages with both long-standing critical commonplaces and more recent debates while presenting original insights that arise from Meyer-Lee's careful reading of Chaucer's work within its historical context. His analysis illuminates professional and paternal dialectics at the heart of the Clerk's, Merchant's, Squire's, and Franklin's prologues and tales, which will provide a guiding light for critics reevaluating other pilgrim performances in the Canterbury Tales.

This is a very rich book, one that should be of interest to Chaucerians who associate themselves with any number of critical or theoretical schools. It asks its readers to consider the relationship between a literary work's meaning and its value, and whether these two things can, or should, be separated. The historical and biographical evidence flows elegantly within Meyer-Lee's adept close reading of Chaucer's work. While a few sentences and passages may create their own hermeneutic difficulties as the jargon strains the syntax, on the whole this is a very compelling and rewarding read. Literary Value and Social Identity in “The Canterbury Tales” is Chaucerian scholarship of the very highest level, a necessary and timely book that significantly adds to our understanding of Chaucer's poetry and professions.