This volume contains ten essays, principally on Chaucer, but also on other English writers of the period such as John Gower, Ranulph Higden and Thomas Hoccleve. The Chaucerian focus includes the dream visions and Troilus and Criseyde as well as the Canterbury Tales.
Reading Chaucer is divided into three sections, on Borderlands, Interiors and After-Images. The essays are representative of methods and approaches to Chaucer that are central to current scholarship: textual criticism, interdisciplinarity, manuscript study, cultural context, iconography, close reading and historicism. The book provides a coherent and authoritative introduction to some of the key frameworks – literary, political, social, scientific, aesthetic and religious – within which Chaucer's works are now read, while covering the full range of his writings and the defining genres of his creative moment, including the chronicle, romance, fabliau and petition.