In this wide-ranging book, Nancy Bradley Warren traces medieval and early modern interpretations and adaptations of Chaucer in relation to religious controversies. She argues that, through reference to Chaucer, religious movements often laid claim to the authority of past; according to Warren, these claims were frequently gendered. For example, early modern Protestant polemicists frequently feminize the Catholic past and so, for them, Chaucer becomes a masculine proto-Protestant figure--a figure that then authorizes Protestantism as authentically English.
The first chapter examines Chaucer's own engagement with religious controversies. Focusing on the much-studied Prioress's Tale and the little-studied Second Nun's Tale, Warren argues that Chaucer reveals the porous boundaries between orthodoxy and heterodoxy at the same time as he navigates the interplay between gender and authority. By emphasizing such ideas as maternal authority and vernacularity, the Second Nun and the Prioress "combine the orthodox and the at least potentially heterodox in their Prologues and Tales as they make manifest aspects of female spirituality that resonate simultaneously with both the Lollard movement and emergent developments in Continental female piety" (16).
Warren then contrasts Chaucer's two fictional female monastics with the reading practices of real-life female monastics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In her second chapter, Warren draws on manuscript evidence from the nunneries of Amesbury and Syon and argues the sisters likely drew upon Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition for rhetorical and political purposes. Though these manuscripts do not contain any commentary written by the nuns, Warren shows that the manuscripts' Chaucerian material aligns with the nuns' familial and political affiliations--thus making the speculative case that the nuns used Chaucer's texts to engage in both spiritual and political self-fashioning.
In the third chapter, "Competing Chaucers," Warren shows how early modern authors slowly consolidated a proto-Protestant identity for Chaucer. In order to show the ways in which writers depicted Chaucer as either an orthodox Catholic or a devout proto-Protestant, she offers detailed close readings of Thynne's Works (1532), Thomas More's Dialogue concerning Heresies (1529), and William Forrest's mid-sixteenth-century writings, particularly his History of Grisild the Second (1558).
Moving to the seventeenth-century, chapter 4 brings together a surprising trio of authors: Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and John Dryden. Warren shows how Catholic writers reintroduced both Julian and Chaucer to seventeenth-century audiences. Though the dominant reception of Chaucer in this century was as a proto-Protestant hero, Catholic writers like Serenus Cressy and Dryden found in Julian and Chaucer a way of reimagining England as a Catholic realm. Through compelling readings of Dryden'sFables, Warren shows how, in light of emerging discourses of rationality, Catholic writers worked to counter the association of Catholicism with the feminine, the fleshly, and the irrational. For these writers, Chaucer becomes "a stabilizing figure, a figure who masculinizes and rationalizes the English Catholic Middle Ages" (99).
With her final chapter, Warren ventures across the Atlantic to consider the Chaucerian tradition in early America. Focusing on the work of three colonial American writers--Cotton Mather, Anne Bradstreet, and Nathaniel Ward--she suggests that the "figure of Chaucer, Chaucer's works, and works in the Chaucerian tradition feature significantly in colonialists' involvements in and negotiations of such religiopolitical conflicts in Old England and New England alike during the mid-seventeenth century" (133). These three authors all draw on the Wife of Bath as an important figure and use the Chaucerian tradition as a way of validating the authority of their own reformed Protestant religion.
Warren provides ample evidence and convincingly detailed close readings throughout the book, an important feature of a book that is so wide-ranging in both its temporal and geographic content. Though it is a relatively short book given the range of historical coverage, she helpfully places her primary texts in historical context for readers who are unlikely to have detailed knowledge of all the periods and texts.
Since this book is so wide-ranging, it would be useful if Warren had outlined the larger implications of her argument. Beyond her readings of individual texts, Warren's argument touches on a variety of big scholarly topics both inside and outside of medieval studies: the race and gender politics of canon formation, gendered reading practices, vernacularity and translation theory, etc. With no concluding chapter, the book seems to leave all those implications and potentially significant interventions hanging.
Overall, this book will be particularly useful to those interested in the development of the Chaucerian tradition as well as scholars of English canon formation more broadly.