It is something of a commonplace that Early Modern reformers considered Geoffrey Chaucer to have proto-Protestant proclivities. In her new book, however, Nancy Bradley Warren tells a rather more complex and interesting story about the understanding and appropriation of Chaucer in the religious controversies in the three centuries after the poet's death. From the readers of Chaucer in fifteenth-century nunneries to references to Chaucer in texts circulating in colonial America, Warren here shows that Chaucer and his characters were ripe for religious appropriation. Warren is an expert guide to this history. She has long been a student of the reception of medieval religious texts in the postmedieval world, charting the movements of texts and ideas diachronically and transnationally, as in her 2010 book The Embodied Word, which brilliantly mapped the reception of medieval English women's spiritual writing by readers and communities in Europe during and after the Reformation. In this new book she casts an even broader net. Considering the complex relationships between religious identity, gender, and national affiliation, Warren shows how post-Chaucerian writers laid claim to very different versions of the poet for their own competing polemical ends.After a brief introduction to the book's main concerns, Warren explores how Chaucer himself sets up these issues. Her first chapter, “Female Spiritual and Religious Controversy in the Canterbury Tales,” considers how three tales narrated by women—The Wife of Bath, the Prioress, and the Second Nun—show Chaucer to be interested in women's religious speech and teaching and “engaged with female spirituality as a vibrant, contentious cultural phenomenon within which the innovatively orthodox and the emergently heretical emerge” (p. 16). The Chaucer that emerges in Warren's reading of these three tales is neither exactly heterodox nor entirely orthodox, but rather is aware of and in conversation with both Lollard and Brigittine writings. Though scholars have long debated Chaucer's engagement with Lollardy, as Warren notes, fewer have attended to the possible influence of Brigittine spirituality—with its focus on vernacularity, incarnation, the maternal, and Marian devotion—on texts such as the “Prioress's Tale.” Warren ultimately argues that the Chaucer who emerges from these tales is a complex, ambiguous, and malleable figure, one thus ripe for appropriation by both orthodox and reformist thinkers in later periods.The second chapter, “Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers” focuses on the reception of Chaucer in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in two powerful English nunneries, Amesbury and Syon Abbey, by examining a single manuscript from each abbey containing material in the Chaucerian tradition. The two fifteenth-century manuscripts that Warren considers are Oxford, Bodleian Library Laud misc. 416, once owned by Syon Abbey; and British Library Additional 18632, owned by the nuns at Amesbury. Perhaps surprisingly given their monastic audience, these are not compilations of religious materials, but rather selections of texts on courtly and political subjects. Notably, the only text by Chaucer included in either manuscript is an imperfect version of the Parliament of Fowls (the first 142 lines of the poem appear in Laud misc. 416). Both manuscripts, though, contain texts in the Chaucerian tradition, including Lydgate's Siege of Thebes and Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes, which praise Chaucer as a model of both “literary auctoritas but also of political gravitas” (p. 43). Noting that the Chaucer imagined in these manuscripts is a devout, orthodox, and didactic figure, Warren argues that for the politically connected women of these two abbeys, Chaucerian texts “provided a means of self-fashioning and identity formation as they negotiated fraught periods of political and religious turmoil” (p. 48). The final section of the chapter turns to another manuscript owned by the nuns of Syon Abbey: Oxford, Jesus MS 39, which contains a treatise Disce mori comprised of selections from didactic and catechetical material including a passage excerpted from Troilus and Criseyde. In one of this book's more speculative sections, Warren takes this excerpt as an opportunity to imagine what Syon nuns might have felt or thought if they would have had access to Troilus and Criseyde. But ultimately, Warren argues, the simple fact that he keeps company with religious writers like Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton reminds us that for many of his Early Modern readers, Chaucer is part of the tradition of English religious writing.In the third chapter, “Competing Chaucers: The Development of Religious Traditions of Reception,” Warren offers a look at the Catholic appropriation of the poet in the long English Reformation. While Chaucer is frequently invoked by Reformers as a proto-Protestant, Warren focuses here on the much lesser known story of how Catholic writers and thinkers also laid claim to Chaucer, whom they read not only as a figure of premodern Catholic orthodoxy but also as a figure associating Catholicism (which was often figured by Protestant writers as a more feminine religion) with masculinity. She develops this argument by looking first at Thomas More's references to Chaucer and his adoption of a Chaucerian style and narrative mode in the Dialogue concerning Heresies, but focuses her analysis on the lesser known History of Grisild the Second by William Forrest, Queen Mary's chaplain. Warren shows that Forrest retells the story of Griselda and Walter as a kind of allegory for Katherine of Aragon and Henry VIII in order to offer a model of nonthreatening Catholic queenship. Warren writes, “this text written for one queen about another seeks carefully to restrict women's political agency through the imposition of a model of female conduct predicated on an idealized interpretation of medieval, female Catholic devotion” (p. 79). Forrest, then, aims to celebrate medieval Catholic female devotion while also using it as a way of limiting female political or social power.Attempts like Forrest's to “cloister” or contain the femininizing elements of medieval Catholicism take a slightly different form in the seventeenth century, as writers find in Chaucer an appropriately masculine figure for the new literary and religious histories they wish to develop. These histories are the subject of the book's fourth chapter, “‘Let Chaucer Also Look to Himself’: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Canon Formation in Seventeenth-Century England,” which focuses largely on the intriguing “Stillingfleet Controversy” in the early 1670s. This was a confessionally-fraught exchange between the Protestant apologist Edward Stillingfleet and Catholic respondents to Stillingfleet following Serenus Cressy's publication of an edition of Julian of Norwich's Showings. Chaucer enters into this conversation in an aside in one of these Catholic responses by “O.N.,” who comments that if Julian is fanatical, then “let Chaucer also look to himself” (p. 110). For Warren, this allusion sets up Chaucer as “an industrious male progenitor who guarantees the inheritance of a ‘pre-lapsarian’ (that is, pre-Protestant) idealized medieval England of Catholic devotion” (p. 110). The second part of the chapter develops this idea of Chaucer as a figure both of Catholicism and as the Father of English poetry by offering a glance at John Dryden's treatment of Chaucer as the origin of the English literary canon in his Fables Ancient and Modern in 1699. Warren argues that taken together, these texts show the ways in which seventeenth-century Catholic writers challenged the negative association of Catholicism (both medieval and contemporary) with the maternal, feminine, bodily, and emotional. For these writers, Warren argues, Chaucer becomes a figure who remasculinizes medieval English Catholicism.The book's final chapter, “‘Flying from the Depravities of Europe, to the American Strand’: Chaucer and Chaucerian Tradition in Early America,” explores the translation of these ideas and controversies to colonial America, focusing on writings by Cotton Mather, Anne Bradstreet, and Nathanial Ward. Each of them, Warren argues, used Chaucer as a means of navigating “past and present, old and new, as they establish[ed] textual, political, and spiritual authority” (p. 134). The figure of the Wife of Bath is important to each of these Puritan writers as they consider the relationship of the religion of new England to “Old England.”It should be clear that I greatly admire the adventurousness and insight of this book, but perhaps also that my enthusiasm for it is tempered by some caveats. Ultimately, Chaucer is a ghostly presence in many of the texts and manuscripts that Warren considers here. His figure is known only as a trace, located in the occasional allusion or mediated through the work of one of his fifteenth-century followers and imitators. A single example will have to suffice. In the final chapter on the Chaucerian tradition in colonial America, Warren notes that in his massive ecclesiastical history, the Magnalia, Cotton Mather “claims the medieval past embodied in Chaucer as a point of origin” for English Protestant identity (p. 141). However, this claim rests on only two brief mentions of Chaucer by Mather. The entirety of the first reads, “that saying of Old Chaucer be remembered, To do the Genteel Deed, that makes the Gentleman” (p. 137). This quotation, drawn from the Wife of Bath's Tale's discourse on gentility, alongside one other similarly brief allusion to “Old Chaucer” (Chaucer's “motto,” which is inscribed on his tomb in Westminster Abbey), serves as the slender foundation on which Warren builds a sweeping argument that Mather views Chaucer as a figure who “grounds . . . a lineage of English religious reform” culminating in the Plymouth governor, William Bradford (p.141). I find this possibility intriguing but wished it were supported with rather more abundant evidence. If this were the only moment in the book where an isolated reference or example were made to bear too much weight, I would not, of course, mention it here, but this is the modus operandi of many of the chapters.Indeed, as compelling as its longue durée approach is, much of the book's argument is speculative and conjectural, frequently advancing its points by means of similarities, analogies, and possibilities. Warren's prose is punctuated with the language of the possible or the hypothetical, of the “might,” the “perhaps,” and the “if.” For this reason, it may be best appreciated as an invitation to further study. It is an important book, but it aims not for comprehensiveness but rather for provocation and imagination. It opens up new scholarly landscapes and avenues of study. And if the evidence in support of Warren's speculations is sometimes more sparse and scattered than one would like, the book as a whole is richly generative and certainly sufficiently compelling to encourage others to dig a little deeper in the archives, for medievalists to think more seriously about reception of medieval authors, text, and ideas in the postmedieval world. And that, it seems to me, is no small accomplishment.