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.

A productive way of approaching Chaucer’s sustained, innovative, often enigmatic engagement with romance can be to entertain the proposition that for him romance was as much a received literary form, predicated on its protagonists’ engagement with adventure and marvel, as it was a model for authorial adventurousness that invited him to compose new and counterintuitive literary marvels. In this, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale shares something of the Gawain-poet’s grave subversion of and experimentation with existing romance form. However, Chaucer’s knowledge of the scholastic impossibilium (as articulated, for instance, through the Franklin and the Wife of Bath), points to a further experimental underpinning, such that we see in his romances the marvel of the marvel-made-empirical.

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.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.

Marriage in Chaucer’s time – how it was defined, created, and who could get married – was significantly different from what it is today. Chaucer clearly knew the canon law of marriage, promulgated through preaching and enforced via the church courts. It was incredibly easy to get married (even, perhaps, unintentionally), through words or deeds, such as exchanging rings like Troilus and Criseyde, or having sex while engaged. However, divorce, in the modern sense of voluntarily ending a valid marriage, did not exist. Joan of Kent’s marriage history illustrates how a clandestine marriage, although strictly prohibited, would still be held up in court and could overturn a subsequent, properly publicised, marriage. Second marriages, to the dismay of the Wife of Bath, were regarded as lesser, as their religious symbolism was flawed. The Church wanted exogamy (marrying outside the wider kinship group) but the main concern for many people was maintaining and increasing their social status.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.