This elegant volume fulsomely honours A. C. Spearing, Emeritus Professor at the University of Virginia. It is striking that many of the essays feature not simply a gracious compliment in a first footnote, or an amusing anecdote in an opening paragraph, but instead are constructed around sustained conversation with Spearing and his scholarship. The volume testifies to a generous career of inspiration in many forms, as teacher, supervisor, colleague and friend, in conversation, by letter and in his many important publications. The majority of the essays concern English poetry written in the late fourteenth century, the work of Langland, Gower and the ‘Gawain’-Poet, and most especially Chaucer (8 of the 12 pieces). Whether by accident or design, the various contributions converge and complement each other much more than one might expect in the average Festschrift. Derek Pearsall considers what exactly ‘experience’, the term which begins the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, signifies in later Middle English. From careful scrutiny of this word, Pearsall sets forth into matters of lexicography, lexical and semantic change and editorial glossing practice. His essay demonstrates how rapid sematic change and resulting polysemy makes Middle English such a fertile resource for poets, as newer and older meanings overlap, permitting ambiguity and providing rich seams for authors to mine. David Aers re-reads Troilus and Criseyde in response to a letter sent by Spearing after the publication of Aers’ Community, Gender and Individual Identity in 1988. Prompted by Spearing’s gentle chiding, Aers finds his younger self too ‘unsympathetic’ (p. 88) to Troilus’s philosophising in Book Four, which Aers had caricatured as a kind of thumb-sucking, a fruitless self-soothing of philosophical speculation which embodies Troilus’s inadequacies. In his re-reading, Aers, drawing on St Augustine and Aquinas, suggests that Chaucer may have suspected that the natural reason of even the most virtuous pagan could not find a way out of the questions Troilus poses about free will and causation without the benefit of revealed Christian truth.