In this age of cuts and crises, it is more important than ever to think critically and carefully about what we teach in literary studies and why. And every teacher who seeks to make Chaucer’s poetry vital and engaging for students new to the field will appreciate Tison Pugh’s catalogue of the “Great Poet’s Greatest Mistakes.” Rather than teaching over contemporary students’ struggles with The Canterbury Tales, Pugh’s book aims to face head on and validate those struggles. The result is an invitation, albeit an indirect one, to reflect on why we continue to teach Chaucer to undergraduates whose world and language are so radically different from the poet’s that a good deal of our teaching amounts to a kind of translation. Bad Chaucer consists of an introduction, twenty-four short chapters, one on each of the tales, and a very short conclusion about Chaucer’s Retraction. The chapters follow the Ellesmere order, but Pugh also includes a “Thematic Table of Contents” that organizes the tales (and chapters) according to the categories of “badness” explained in the introduction: “Genre Troubles”; “Themeless Themes”; “Mischaracterized Characters”; “Pleasureful, Purposeful, and Purposeless Badness”; and “Outmoded Perspectives.” This categorizing of the various ways in which Chaucer’s tales frustrate or perplex, if used heuristically, is one of the most helpful elements of the book and could be fruitfully applied as a teaching strategy.

There are, however, several ways in which Pugh’s book frustrates and perplexes, too. The introduction is very clear on what the book will not do, but less clear on what it hopes to achieve. Pugh is dismissive of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dismissals of Chaucer’s work because they “mistake moralism for literary merit” (4). He also states that the book will not “engage in a debate grounded on aesthetic philosophies”; nor will it aim “to establish a theory of antiaesthetics” (5). Purporting to chart Chaucer’s “badness” neither on moral nor on aesthetic grounds, Pugh nonetheless outlines what sound very much like moral and aesthetic criteria, criteria that prize values of equality, individual freedom and autonomy, originality, verisimilitude, and consistency of theme and character. He contends further that, just as historical criticisms or rejections of Chaucer express the critics’ tastes more than they elucidate Chaucer’s texts, “likewise this volume’s assessment of Chaucer’s badness can only be ascribed to the particularities and idiosyncrasies of my readings of theCanterbury Tales” (4). A few pages on, he repeats the idea that “[d]iscerning badness is a highly idiosyncratic venture, one that perhaps tells more about the reader than the text,” but adds, discerning badness “is simultaneously enlightening about both” (6). Here, I would have liked to read more about how, in particular, the book aims to enlighten about reader and text. Moreover, I would argue that leaning too heavily on idiosyncrasy risks neglecting the historical embeddedness of readers, authors, and texts, as well as the complex social forces that shape, and change, literary taste and ideas of authority over time. Readers’ assessments of Chaucer’s brillianceand of the flaws and weaknesses that mar even his best poems, including Pugh’s own assessments, are not simply idiosyncratic, nor can they be hived off from current moral and aesthetic debates. Rather, these assessments are the essence of literary studies, the fruit of sustained and complex conversations between communities of readers and texts. Bad Chaucer is not a book about the history of Chaucer studies, nor is it about the politics of canon formation, but by characterizing its assessment of Chaucer’s flaws as “idiosyncratic,” it refuses to situate its own value judgments in their historical and cultural context.

The strength of Bad Chaucer lies in its insight that much of what still resonates with students today can be found in the disjunctions and problems of The Canterbury Tales, and thus that good pedagogical practice involves exploring these disjunctions and problems anew. I couldn’t agree more. I do wonder if “badness” is the most effective guiding concept for such a project of exploration, not least because of the voluminous scholarship that exists precisely to distinguish between creative tensions and artistic flaws in Chaucer’s work, between moments of carefully calibrated irony and moments of confusing inconsistency. The sympathy we feel for John the cuckolded husband in The Miller’s Tale, for instance, concludes the fabliau on a strangely poignant note without dampening its ribald humour, whereas the hints of Lollardy associated with the Parson, whose “tale” is a penitential treatise, suggest that Chaucer had not yet made up his mind about what kind of religious figure the final tale-teller was to embody. Both John and the Parson are categorized as “Mischaracterized Characters” according to Pugh’s taxonomy, but surely the surprising or even jarring elements of these characters have the salutary effect of challenging certain stereotypes of maleness and heterodoxy, respectively, even though it seems clear that the inconsistencies in John’s character are deliberate whereas those in the Parson come across as the result of incomplete composition. Likewise, while it is accurate and clarifying to characterize The Knight’s Tale as an imperfect blend of epic and romance, the idea that The Friar’s Tale and The Summoner’s Tale fall into the same category of “badness” because they, too, suffer from “Genre Troubles” obscures more than it illuminates.

A book that celebrates by zeroing in on the obstacles that modern readers encounter in The Canterbury Tales, Bad Chaucer is a potentially useful addition to the teaching toolbox of Chaucer studies. By raising more questions than it answers about how we might understand these obstacles in light of the history of Chaucer studies or of current debates about the value and content of literary studies, Bad Chaucer invites further reflection and discussion--and that is not bad at all.