In 2024, a search inquiry for “Chaucer, Geoffrey” submitted to the MLA International Bibliography will yield approximately 12,000 unique results: such an overabundance of past scholarship on “the Father of English Poetry” might incline us to wonder what more could possibly be said about Chaucer, and particularly about his most famous work. At the least, we might suspect that close reading as a methodology for approaching The Canterbury Tales must surely have long ago exhausted itself, most likely at some point in the twentieth century.Rereleased in paperback earlier this year, Samantha Katz Seal’s monograph Father Chaucer: Generating Authority in The Canterbury Tales demonstrates that new and compelling interpretations of Chaucer’s unfinished tale collection can continue to be generated, and even through close reading as a primary interpretive strategy; sometimes an entire page will be devoted to the explication of a single line. To emphasize how central close reading remains to Seal’s critical practice is not to downplay the erudition on display throughout the book and the depth of her work’s engagement with, for example, medieval medical discourses including: the spectacularly misogynistic “secrets of women” tradition; Aristotelian sciences and alchemical counter-science; premodern inheritance law and its many convolutions; and other contexts essential to understanding Chaucer and his time with historical and intellectual specificity. As the nature of these key discourses might suggest, Father Chaucer: Generating Authority in The Canterbury Tales is finally less concerned with authority and more with “generating” as a concept: Seal’s central argument holds that throughout the text we see a surprisingly consistent interest in--and conclusions concerning--reproduction and generation as multivalent concepts tied to both biological and literary lineages. As such, she understands the Tales as “a poem about male authority in the midst of patriarchal crisis,” and “a poem of a poet uncertain in his posterity” (4). Chaucer, in Seal’s view, recognizes the limitations of patrilineality as both “a legal and a social construct” in his own time (7), and in his poetry emphasizes paternity as “the physiological embodiment of human doubt and human inadequacy” (4).

Father Chaucer represents the vanguard of a new generation of feminist responses to Chaucer; in the acknowledgments, the author thanks the medievalist feminist community as well as the care workers who labored to care for her own young children and so themselves enabled the writing of the book. Strikingly, in every chapter Seal positions Chaucer as critical of and indeed keen to expose patriarchy’s self-satisfied illusions, yet not himself doing so from any kind of necessarily proto-feminist perspective. Part of the originality of the book lies in this intriguing appraisal of Chaucer’s work as in some sense anti-patriarchal, but perfectly capable of remaining anti-feminist at the same time: “Women [...] become an essential part of The Canterbury Tales without ever truly mattering within the poem” (10). Because women play a part in reproduction, they must play a part in these tales that philosophize about and through reproduction; at the same time, Chaucer is not so much countering the misogyny of so much gynecological and obstetric writing, but only critiquing the ambitions of men to rely on such unreliable “material” as women’s bodies (wives or daughters) for successful and “faithful” reproduction. From Seal’s perspective, where Chaucer turns for hope is not to women, men, or their children, but rather the divine, seeing the poem as a testament to “the perseverance of man’s desire to produce” but finally “a text that emphasizes the inevitability of loss and the imminent humbling of mankind before the judgment of its God” (227-8).

This image of Chaucer may seem unexpectedly pious, especially when compared to the figure of the ironic, irreverent, and otherwise playful author that has characterized so much Chaucer scholarship over the past few decades. Seal encourages us to read the final movement of the collection heavenward via the Parson as “an ultimate, yet uneasy acquiescence to religious doctrine” (23). In this light, she does see much of Chaucer’s irony and play--for example in the adulterous hijinks of the fabliaux--ultimately in service of quite somber meditations on mortality and the unreliability of transmission over generations. There is also a kind of boldness on Seal’s part in insisting that reproduction is not only “one of the symbolic languages of the poem,” but in fact “the all-encompassing hermeneutic against which all such semiotics must be read” (9); without exception, reproduction therefore acts as “the underpinning of his philosophical exploration” (10). Any appraisal of The Canterbury Tales claiming to have found a “unity” in the text might seem old-fashioned, but Seal unreservedly puts forth a well-grounded new version of such a unifying framework for understanding the work. Some readers will, I think, find the all-encompassing nature of Seal’s argument(s) more difficult to accept, but I doubt any would reject her basic identification of these “generative” concerns and their potential significance en masse. Along similar lines, some of the individual readings of particular tales or passages will naturally persuade more than others, and some also represent more radical breaks from previous interpretations than others--and these of course are not always the same. On the whole, however, the book presents a very convincing demonstration of a preoccupation with reproduction (whether or not it is quite so unifying and absolute), both in Chaucer as well as in the broader late medieval cultural contexts in which Seal locates his responses, the latter perhaps the study’s more important intervention.

After an introduction that lays out the premises of the argument and provides some essential contexts concerning various crises of paternity in the later Middle Ages, the book is divided into three additional sections each containing a pair of chapters that respectively address the concepts of certainty, creation, and likeness. The first chapter, “Sexual Exegetics and the Female Text,” begins with The Manciple’s Tale and the challenges to masculine certainty that it poses, comparing Chaucer’s version of the story with others to emphasize how his creative decisions interface with “the reproductive underpinnings of medieval adultery law,” a concern that will reappear prominently in the fourth chapter, “Adultery’s Heirs: Multiplying Excess” (35). In this first chapter, an extended discussion of The Clerk’s Tale helps Seal further establish such a semiotics of doubt, the tale standing as “a sharp denunciation of those fathers who rebel and struggle against acquiescence to the divine will” (37). Particularly in evidence here, Seal always remains scrupulous--sometimes perhaps too scrupulous--to position her readings in careful relation to existing interpretations of Chaucer’s work, such that the book can almost serve as a survey of past criticism in parts (only occasionally does the forest of footnotes grow a little unappealingly dense). The second chapter in the section “On Certainty” is titled “The Uneasy Institution: Lineage and the Wife of Bath,” and argues that Chaucer uses the Wife in her Prologue and Tale as a tool of “disruption and disorder” to challenge “the institutions of masculinity that undergird men’s lives” (59). For Chaucer, women can--and indeed by their very existence do--undermine male lineage and male temporality, but not in any positive way. There is no hope for an alternative to be found here, only an affirmation that men “are right to worry” about certainty and paternity (91).

Nevertheless, the second section, “On Creation,” begins with an examination of “two modes of alternative generation” that both fascinate and finally dissatisfy Chaucer (97), the one fundamentally religious, even devotional, in nature, and the other alchemical, for Seal a twisted shadow of the first. The primary tales under discussion are therefore The Second Nun’s Tale and The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale: in the former, Seal locates for instance a “form of poetic and spiritual generation both sexed and sexless,” as when the Second Nun collaborates with the Virgin Mary as muse (105). Yet, “Even as spiritual allegory, medieval understandings of procreation restricted catalytic generative activity to men alone” (102): Chaucer himself is no feminist and does not truly strive to think beyond such restrictions, even if he disapproves of the alchemical quest satirized in the other tale far more harshly, with its indefensibly mercenary motivation to innovate reproductively. Seal’s analyses of the crucial words “engendren” and “mutiplien” are particularly illuminating in this third chapter and in the fourth, which takes up Chaucer’s Pardoner in conjunction with the fabliaux as a unit, although with special weight given toThe Summoner’s Tale, The Reeve’s Tale, and The Merchant’s Tale. This fourth chapter above all positions the medieval wife as a form of reproductive “technology” to be employed by men to reproduce themselves faithfully, with the consequence that “Tales of adultery are tales of failed collaboration, dark accounts of technology’s rebellion against its scientists” (124). In this compelling view, Alisoun and May become Brides of Frankenstein, “creative technologies run amok” that are less villains than that which reveals male “culpabilities and failings,” such as an impossible grasping after immortality in the transmission of goods and genes across generations, bound to fail (160).

The fifth chapter, “Almost Heirs: Daughters and Disappointments,” begins the section “On Likeness,” and takes up that “most problematic form of inadvertent female reproductive obstruction,” namely, “the production of daughters” (166). This chapter, the longest in the book, proceeds as a thorough reading of The Man of Law’s Tale that also travels the greatest distance from the core reproductive concerns of the project, especially in its discussions of Islam as a “likeness” of Christianity, and the concept of likeness in cognition more broadly. Daughters embody “unlikeness” and therefore represent “a threat to the integrity of the paternal identity” (199), but this discussion of daughters as failed heirs and failed likenesses becomes particularly compelling in its analysis not of the simple link between father and daughter, but rather the multi-generational intricacies of the relationships among grandparents, children, and grandchildren. Comparatively brief, the sixth and final chapter doubles as a conclusion, and provides a final survey of “Chaucer’s search for some mode of human authority” in the face of that search’s inevitable failure, focusing on The Monk’s Tale and his Retractions (217). While I wrote previously that the view of Chaucer that emerges from the book is a more pious one than in this century we might be accustomed to, Seal’s reading of Chaucer’s act of retraction counterintuitively frames it ambiguously as “a testament to productivity, a cataloging of what his life has left within the world” (227), an acknowledgment of his own limitations and the “imperfections of [his] creations” that also affirms that such imperfect creations are all we can hope for as mortals, and thus so not divergent from the attitudes Seal finds throughout his works.

While Father Chaucer makes an argument about the entirety of the Tales, it does not cover quite every tale in the collection: absences include the tales of the Cook (not likely to be missed in this context), Franklin (perhaps much more important an omission due to the social ambitions of the teller and the specter of adultery in the tale), Friar, and Squire, as well as Chaucer’s own Melibee, although these latter two are at least mentioned in passing and therefore integrated in some way into the framework. Beyond the curious nonappearance of The Franklin’s Tale, the book also makes very little reference to Troilus and Criseyde (discussed mainly in relation to its envoy): I would have liked to have understood more completely how this other major poem may fit into the trajectory of Chaucer’s career that Seal sketches, in her analysis beginning with more hope in patriarchy’s reproductive power though culminating in the many reproductive anxieties so thoroughly refracted in the Tales. But such omissions do not detract much from the already ambitious undertaking that is the book’s tracing of “a systematic process of masculine undermining” in the Canterbury pilgrimage (19). In summation, Father Chaucer provides a sophisticated and novel lens for approaching Chaucer that opens up new readings of passages, images, and tales long thought “settled” or exhausted; even the block of ice from Chaucer’s House of Fame on which names are inscribed can be turned back as a reflection on biological reproduction rather than only on poetic authority and historical remembrance (15). Seal’s book deftly balances careful (re)readings of Chaucer’s lines with both new critical perspectives and underexamined contexts from contemporaneous medical and philosophical discourses. It represents an important and innovative contribution to Chaucer scholarship.