In Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales, his close reading of fragments IV–V as a continuous narrative, Robert Mayer-Lee argues persuasively that this four-tale segment of the Canterbury Tales should be considered whole and central to Chaucer's late-stage arrangement. Meyer-Lee reviews manuscript evidence, reminding us that early editors (notably Frederick Furnivall) first divided the four tales into two fragments, but that early manuscripts suggest instead that by the end of the Canterbury process the four tales were effectively linked. Some of the links in IV–V seem to be late additions to Hengwrt manuscript (in a lighter ink than that used for the surrounding tales, for example) but are fully present and given their due space in the Ellesmere manuscript (4–7). In addition, in his hypothetical reconstruction of the tales and links sequencing, Meyer-Lee finds evidence that Chaucer may have returned to this section of the tales late in the Canterbury process, whether or not he had conceived of these four tales as commenting upon one another at the time of their individual composition.

Taking the tales in the order they appear in the Ellesmere manuscript (Clerk, Merchant, Squire, Franklin), and giving a chapter to each, Meyer-Lee outlines each tale's “axiological apologia,” by which he means each one's argument for the value of fiction within the larger Canterbury Tales project, a project that he assumes is central to Chaucer's own identity as poet.

Chapter 1 considers the Clerk's “poetically self-conscious performance” (27) and ties it to Chaucer's changed circumstances, as he had moved from the court, back into the mercantile milieu of the London customs house. In closely translating Petrarch's tale of Griselda, Chaucer's Clerk introduces lexical markers, including many more instances of the word tempten and its variants than are used in Petrarch's version, which serve to highlight the malevolence of Walter's tests (45–51). After a close reading of the Clerk's “Envoy,” which leaves us with “an unresolved set of juxtapositions” (55), Meyer-Lee then joins this particularly dark rendering of the tale to university values, or an “axiological apologia,” which places the Clerk in a kind of perpetual adolescence and sets him up, along with all he represents, to be critiqued by the merchant's alternate set of values.

The Merchant's “symbolically paternal rebuke” (77) to the Clerk's performance (chapter 2) begins with a wonderful reading of the Merchant's tone, finding not an embittered husband but an “ironic, mordantly playful” (90) voice. Developing a reading of the Merchant's tale as being in line with the fabliaux “law of desire” (98), Meyer-Lee ties this use of fiction to a pragmatic, realist effort that can “sustain human relationships” (112), even when divorced from reality, and he then proceeds to tie it to Chaucer's biography: “In moving from the Clerk to the Merchant . . . Chaucer moves from one aspect of himself to another” (127), from his court service to his role as Controller of the wool customs.

The Squire's performance (chapter 3) is deemed another failed attempt in Chaucer's own search for “literary value” (134)—not a failed example of composite romance, as some have argued, but a failure of the genre itself, a genre that draws attention to its own mystery and enchantment. Here Meyer-Lee relates the tale to the mysteries of inherited class—the noble status that must elude most people, including Chaucer. In an example of Meyer-Lee's reading of Chaucer's own character, acknowledging that Chaucer's status as esquire was the highest rung possible for him, “gentle largely by association” (166), he surmises, “For the axiological person that the Squire represents, literary composition possesses a social value that would have been comparatively less fungible for Chaucer, and evidently also one that was . . . comparatively less important to him” (167).

Great care is given to a nondramatic treatment of Chaucer's pilgrims, studiously called “axiological persons [because they] do not constitute characters in the sense of implying a distinctive subjectivity or interiority” (16). But this same care is not also afforded the construction of Chaucer. To be sure, Chaucer lived and died in a specific time and place, and we know something of his life. But to reconstruct his motivations, obsessions, and entente is itself fiction making. And while most Chaucerians (myself included) may be implicated in this activity, to insist so strongly on not doing that for Chaucer's fictional pilgrims draws attention to the ways Meyer-Lee is doing that for Chaucer. Imagining the effects of Chaucer's “day job as controller of customs” (14) on his literary activity; speculating that Chaucer's own “psychobiographical developmental trajectory” (21) may be read into the IV–V sequence, including a father-son dynamic relating to “masculine social identities” (21); and projecting throughout “what the IV-V sequence meant for Chaucer” (26) all point to Meyer-Lee's investment in creating a value-laden “axiological person” in Chaucer, without also admitting that it, too, remains a fiction.

Most profitably read in sequence, this book builds its argument block-by-block. By the time we arrive at the Franklin's performance (chapter 4), we can fully appreciate the identification of the Franklin's tale as “a pseudo Breton lai haunted by a fabliau” (186) and the meticulous dissection of the second-person pronouns used among the Franklin, Squire, and Host, which enacts their relational social status. Meyer-Lee's masterful attention to tone and voice in these exchanges showcases Chaucer's language in action and illustrates, with a culminating example, a foundational strength of Meyer-Lee's argument.