This chapter demonstrates the influential role of printed books in defining Chaucer’s canon and the implications of that newly formed canon for older books. It considers a series of texts which early modern readers added to manuscripts (and some early printed books) to update and improve them: short poems including Prophecy, Words to Adam, and Bon counsail; Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid; various Plowman-themed texts; the Tale of Gamelyn; and the Retraction. The chapter argues that print made available an array of genuine and apocryphal works which readers could extract, assemble, and reconfigure in line with their own tastes and understanding of the Chaucer canon. The evidence collected in the chapter shows the persistence of particular narratives about Chaucer’s works which were promoted in print: that he was a poet of fin amour, that he condemned Criseyde to a wretched death, that he assigned his Plowman an anticlerical tale, and that the Retraction was a later monkish forgery. The changeability of the manuscript books chronicled in this chapter reflects a concurrent reshaping of Chaucer’s reputation in the period and the variability of his literary canon itself.

Lust or luxuria, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, was a rich and resonant term in the medieval Christian world, evoking a whole range of appetites and desires while speaking to penitential and other ecclesiastical discourses on human sexuality. Chaucer was an avid and inventive theorist and narrator of lust in its many emotional, affective and incarnate permutations, treating the category of lust with great ingenuity though with a surprising inconsistency inherited in part from scholastic discourses on the sin and its ramifications in human life. In Chaucer’s representations of Criseyde, Troilus, the Wife of Bath, and the Parson, among many others, lust functions as both a simple human desire for some end as well as a direct pathway to sin.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.