Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

‘Secularity’ is here taken to involve matters which are lay and earthly as opposed to otherworldly and spiritual. Personal experience was being allowed its own authority, a principle which often features in Chaucer’s poetry, as when he portrays a woman with much experience of marriage and a marquis who obsessively tests his wife’s virtue. Certain marvels were acknowledged to have natural rather than miraculous causes; this belief features in the tales told by the Squire and Franklin. Chaucer condemns false alchemists who dupe victims into believing that they are seeing precious metals being created. As far as astrology/astronomy is concerned, he makes use of secular science whilst disassociating himself from the pagan beliefs held by its ancient proponents. His sociopolitical values often reflect those associated with recently recovered works by Aristotle. Secularity and religiosity were not invariably in opposition, but sometimes the strains showed – as in Chaucer’s Retractions.