David Hopkins and Tom Mason: Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century: The Father of English Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century is, as the subtitle suggests, a narrative of fathers and sons. It is a hugely important and magisterial new work which resituates Chaucer at the centre of eighteenth-century literature. As Hopkins and Mason note in their introductory chapter, the importance and popularity of Chaucer during the period has long been overlooked or underestimated, save for the pioneering work of Betsy Bowden. Those areas of Chaucerian scholarship which have seen more critical attention, such as Alexander Pope’s adaptations of The Merchant’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, and The House of Fame, or John Dryden’s Fables: Ancient and Modern, are situated within a wider discourse of Chauceriana, which incorporates everything from the 1712 Miller of Trompington (an adaptation of the Reeve’s Tale which slightly softened the obscenity of the original), to William Godwin’s 1803 Life of Chaucer, which provided a full biography of the poet largely gleaned from his writings (a mistake). One of the most interesting chapters of the book concerns the Chaucerian apocrypha, in particular the ever-popular Flower and the Leaf, praised in 1859 by The Dublin University Magazine as “the most beautiful and pure of all Chaucer’s works,” and immortalised in verse by John Keats.