Mary Flannery, Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard. London: Reaktion Books, 2024, pp. 208; ill.

Mary Flannery, who holds a Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship at the University of Bern, has written a new biography of Geoffrey Chaucer. Her book joins the ranks of other biographies about this subject, including Derek Brewer’s Chaucer and his World (1978), Donald Roy Howard’s Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (1987), Derek Pearsall’s Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1992), Paul Strohm’s Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (2014), and Marion Turner’s award-winning Chaucer: A European Life (2019). Flannery’s book differs from these accounts in its conciseness (two of the prior biographies, by Howard and Turner, are both over 600 pages) and in its focus. Hers seeks to re-evaluate the “father of English literature” in light of his posthumous reputation as a bawdy poet or, as the subtitle indicates, “merry bard.” A third distinguishing aspect of Flannery’s biography is her consistent interest in the reception of Chaucer and his work in subsequent centuries, hence her inclusion in her select bibliography of John Bowers’ The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions (1992), Steve Ellis’ Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (2000), and David Hopkins’s and Tom Mason’s Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century: The Father of English Poetry (2022). (Missing from her list is Seth Lerer’s excellent study, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England [1993], which, despite the subtitle, considers the reception of Chaucer’s life and works in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.) Flannery’s inclusion of manuscripts and early printed editions alongside these critical studies is not just for show: in her book, she analyzes what these primary sources tell us today about Chaucer’s reception.