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.