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I spent over three decades teaching "The Canterbury Tales," and for the last fifteen years, I required Cooper's Oxford Guide and Lillian Bisson's "Chaucer and the Late Medieval World" as indispensable supplements to the Riverside Chaucer. Cooper's concise surveys of all of the relevant contexts of each of the poems--manuscript traditions, sources, genre, rhetoric, form, relationship to the other poems, etc.--enrich beyond measure our understanding and appreciation of the oft-called Father of English Poetry. This is a perfect example of practical scholarship and criticism, well written, sensible, and compelling.
