The central question to ask of any new collection of essays on the poet Geoffrey Chaucer is, what does it contribute to the prolific industry that surrounds this major author? That is, what new angle of interpretation does it provide for his works amid the vast scholarship of different approaches, theoretical orientations, and pedagogical applications that produces every year a cacophony of books, chapters, and articles that vie for attention like avian debaters in “The Parliament of Fowls”?

In this interesting new volume the answer would seem to reside in its subtitle, Words, Authority and Ethics. These terms denote broad topics, indeed, yet they ring true of the eclectic contents found in Chaucer’s Poetry edited by Clíodhna Carney and Frances McCormack. Matters of ethics and authority connect most of the first nine chapters, which contextualize and analyze features of Chaucer’s poetry. The final two essays form an afterword on more modern views of Chaucer: Chaucer’s digital afterlives, that is, his literal absence yet ongoing presence in blogs (Malte Urban); and William Morris’s Chaucer as a vehicle for his nineteenth-century ideas on labor, as reflected in the Kelmscott Chaucer (Richard Pearson).

Here I will chiefly examine Chaucer’s Poetry in relation to themes of authority and ethics. Editors Carney and McCormack supply a very short introduction (just four pages) in which they seem reluctant to assert even these notions as the unifying rationales, despite the subtitle. They assert that “the key is variety; this collection is more various than many, in that its organizing principle is not a sub-species of Chaucer, not even a genus, but the kingdom of Chaucer, undifferentiated, except for the differentiations brought to the subject by the diverse minds represented here” (14). The subject is, then, anything Chaucer.

Nonetheless, ethical considerations come to the fore in chapters by John Scattergood, Niamh Patwell, Megan Murton, and Brendan O’Connell. Scattergood looks at the valence of the phrase gode felawe in John Clanvowe and his friend Chaucer, juxtaposing it to Martin Scorsese’s 1990 film. The term, he writes, connotes conniving deceit in Middle English, and from Chaucer’s ironic uses Scattergood builds a fine analysis of the devil’s workings in the “icily brilliant” “Friar’s Tale” (35). Patwell examines the Prioress’s precarious worldview, that is, how in her tale the quotidian concerns of humans always return to disrupt the pristine heavenly vision that she seeks. Murton discusses how Chaucer means us to understand the word doctrine in the Canterbury Tales as the active process of interpretation; she views Chaucer as a profoundly ethical poet. Echoing this position, O’Connell demonstrates how counterfeit documents in “The Man of Law’s Tale” and the “The Clerk’s Tale” portray a multiplicitous world and the “need to distinguish true impressions of the good from the false” (145) despite the frailty of human discernment.

Reflections on authority unite the essays of Clíodhna Carney, Helen Phillips, Frances McCormack, and Charlotte Steenbrugge. Carney revisits the oft-examined Wife of Bath’s impersonation of clericalism and the Clerk’s response to it, which remains moderate until the Envoy unleashes his full rhetorical art. In a wide-ranging chapter, Phillips examines Apolline traditions as played out in fourteenth-century political self-fashioning, and she locates sun-god imagery (connoting poetic or monarchal authority) in several Chaucerian poems. McCormack takes an approach to “The Prioress’s Tale” different from Patwell’s, comparing its problematic rhetoric to that of the Pardoner and declaring it a tale of “style over substance, body over spirit, form over content” (116). Looking at contradictory references to time in “The Parliament of Fowls,” Steenbrugge argues that they are introduced by Chaucer in order “to undermine the narratorial authority and the supposedly timeless authority of certain genres” (133).

The chapter written by Kristin Lynn Cole addresses most purely the third part of the subtitle, Words, read here as metrics. Her interesting essay, an outlier in the book, visits the metrical landscape of fourteenth-century England and declares it a time of great experimentation, with Chaucer’s syllable-timed meter coexisting with strong-stress alliterative meter. She elucidates how the meter of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight deftly combines both impulses. Chaucer’s Poetry is a well-produced book, cleanly edited, lightly indexed, and provided with a cumulative bibliography. With its many thought-provoking readings, scholars interested in the ample range of Chaucerian interpretation will gladly welcome it to the fold.