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.

Although much about holiness in Chaucer’s works remains disputed, elliptical, or even contradictory, many of his images of religious devotion and popular piety are themselves situated in a broader cultural context than is usually recognised. For Chaucer, as for most late medieval Christians of his day, holiness was instantiated in matter, present and manifest in shrines, relics, holy objects and in the natural world, and he shows himself attentive to such materiality in his images of popular religion. Many of the Tales celebrate orthodox Christian materiality in ways that align his devotional interests with those found in a broad range of English religious writings by authors with whom he is not typically connected, including Julian of Norwich and the Carthusian Nicholas Love. Other Tales offer an incisive critique of holiness in the context of contemporary practices within the Church. Chaucer’s many-sided works hold these glimmering tensions in balance.