Published this week, Chaucer’s Ethical Philosophy reveals the deep engagement of Chaucer’s fictions with the most urgent questions of modern political and ethical philosophy.

This new reading of the foundational English writer has been researched by Professor Laura Ashe, David Woods Kemper Family Fellow & Tutor in English at Worcester. Ashe’s close analysis of Troilus and Criseyde, the Canterbury Tales, and the Book of the Duchess illuminates the ways in which Chaucer anticipates modern philosophical debates: Chaucer’s fictional experiments are shown to be as philosophically complex and ethically powerful as anything in current thought.

The book places Chaucer in close dialogue not only with medieval philosophy and theology, and his great European literary sources (Boccaccio, Dante, Guillaume de Machaut), but with major figures and concepts of modern philosophical thought (Hegel, Levinas, Wittgenstein, Butler; recognition, subjectivity, gender).

Ashe argues that, through his distinctively medieval forms of narrative, Chaucer explores ideas and develops philosophies that we have been conditioned to think of as exclusively modern. In this he reveals both the essential nature of the questions, and the contingent, socially- and culturally- conditioned nature of our answers; and he shows us that medieval structures of thought remain central to our understandings of the world.

Chaucer’s Ethical Philosophy is published by Oxford University Press and is available to read online.