In the first sentence of the preface to Chaucer’s Ethical Philosophy, Laura Ashe states explicitly that ‘this book is not animated by a singular or unifying argument about Chaucer’.Footnote ¹ Upon reading the book, the purpose and need for this disclaimer becomes evident. Ashe presents – over the course of five chapters – a brief survey of the Chaucerian canon through various lens of philosophical ideologies. Ashe has made it clear that her book is not meant to be read as a collective structure beyond its shared experience of philosophical analysis. Rather, she presents through this text a compilation of individual analyses that together form a whole that is certainly a collected image or impression, if not a singular argument.

Ranging from readings of The Wife of Bath’s Tale to Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer’s Ethical Philosophy draws our attention to moments within the canon where Ashe suggests that philosophical ideologies that we have long associated with the modern era exist clearly, openly, and intentionally within a selection of Chaucer’s works. This presents Chaucerians – and indeed medievalists in general – not with the suggestion that later philosophers took cues or inspiration from Chaucer or other medieval authors, but rather that these ideas that we have so long considered being birthed only from the minds of contemporary philosophers were present at least in thought-form far earlier even if not expressively articulated in the ways modernity would come to. Ashe highlights that many base-level philosophical questions concerning concepts such as recognition, subjectivity, love, and pain and suffering, were not only being addressed in Chaucer’s works, but they were done so deliberately and in channels that can be used to inform our own methods of comprehending aspects of their later contemporary philosophical spaces.

The book additionally refrains from uniting around a specific philosophical theme even within its collection of lenses; however, two of its five chapters centre on the question of recognition, where Ashe reveals that her inspiration for the project was founded. In the first and longest chapter of the book Ashe takes reader through an analysis of the struggle of recognition as it is seen in three short episodes from The Canterbury Tales (The Clerk’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, and The Franklin’s Tale). Ashe argues that Chaucer’s presentation of Griselda and Walter can be read as not only comparable to but retrospectively critical of the Hegelian servant–master paradox, as Griselda’s development throughout the tale as an independent self-consciousness is never recognized by Walter and thus, she can never recognize him. Chaucer has created a space where the master’s own inability to be recognized is all that saves the servant’s life, but does not result in recognition for either, presenting an uncomfortable situation that is highlighted even more by the brief diversion at the end suggesting that this could be a story about God – however, it, of course, is not.

Ashe then further develops this focus on Chaucer’s experimentation with recognition by transitioning into a conversation about the Wife of Bath as an exemplar of the ways in which Chaucer appears to be acutely aware of the power dynamics that play key roles in the experience of recognition from this same master–servant relationship. Such dynamics that later philosophers would write theoretical circles around, Chaucer embraces and exposes, demonstrating through his Wife of Bath that the concept of mutual recognition within a heterosexual relationship is unlikely to be realized. The Wife becomes another character seeking recognition but seeking it within a framework of sexism and misogyny that ultimately renders her searching similarly futile but in a different way than Walter and Griselda’s were.

In the final section of the chapter, Ashe temporarily concludes this discussion of recognition with a foray into the The Franklin’s Tale, where the marriage between Arveragus and Dorigen is constructed on terms and conditions that break the norms of medieval heterosexual relationships. However, Ashe observes that this alternative arrangement does not solve the imbalances of power discussed in the previous two instances, and ultimately still does not guarantee mutual recognition. It instead suggests that the concept is not achievable, and rather something that is perpetually worked towards rather than singularly accomplished. A Levinasian analysis of the tale reveals important aspects about encounters with the feminine other as Dorigen, through her encounter with Aurelius, transitions from that feminine other – defined by her relationship to Arveragus – to the subject herself, now defined by both Arveragus and then Aurelius’s specific proposition. In her conclusion of this brief, recognition-focused journey through The Canterbury Tales, Ashe poignantly invites readers to consider that in his dealing with matters of recognition and subjectivity, Chaucer again does what many later philosophers do not: include women in these conversations, featuring them as subjects in search of recognition and highlighting the ways in which their social and political spaces have been constructed to prevent them from reaching those ends.

After a three-chapter diversion, Ashe’s fifth chapter takes recognition once again as a focus, except this time it is discussed concerning love within Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Ashe posits that the ways in which Chaucer develops the characters of both Troilus and Criseyde from his source materials creates a theory of human love, in which Troilus achieves recognition of Criseyde as an independent other outside of his own being, and nevertheless still maintains his love for her even when he has lost her.

The first of the non-recognition focused chapters, Ashe’s second chapter, although titled as though it addresses a singular text, The Book of the Duchess, actually spends a large amount of the first half of the chapter engaging closely with Chaucer’s primary source for that text, or Machaut’s The Judgement of the King of Bohemia. In both the exploration of The Judgement and then The Book of the Duchess, Ashe extracts the concept of comparison of states of experiencing pain framed through a Wittgensteinian lens, highlighting Chaucer’s centring of the ethical dilemma in which we experience pain and through those experiences seek to understand the pain of others. In chapter three, Ashe sets out what Chaucer is doing with subjectivity in The Physician’s Tale and The Pardoner’s Tale as a combined thought experiment. The choice Virginia makes to end her own life (at the behest of her father – the debate surrounding this moment of consent Ashe is clear to make apparent) is contrasted with the Pardoner’s old man’s inability to be able to choose death at all. Virginia’s choice of death is bracketed within the space of threatened violation of female sexuality while the Old Man’s inability to choose death reflects a space of innocence that is not given the relief of death. In chapter four, the text returns to the start of The Canterbury Tales and centres The Knight’s Tale in a discussion of the way in which the world of the tale is conceptualized and presented. For Ashe, being in the world of The Knight’s Tale is to be in a state of hopelessly unresolvable chaos, because of the characters’ reach for divine justice from a world sunk into paganism and godly whims. Ashe’s middle chapters may not be possible to reconcile within a single concept, but they demonstrate quickly their importance and relevance to the conversation she has begun.

One may arrive at the end of Chaucer’s Ethical Philosophy without witnessing the creation of a unified argument, but the multiple threads collected along the way speak to a future of promising integration within its innovative frame. Despite the clarification at its start, the book’s purposeful fragmentation can still present momentary challenge to a reader attempting to refrain from searching for a way to connect all the pieces of the text, as Ashe deliberately cautions her readers not to do. However, when read through its intended framework of compiled collection rather than cohesive argument, Chaucer’s Ethical Philosophy presents its readers with a reading of Chaucerian texts with an eye to different theoretical principles that have previously gone unnoticed. Ashe’s book is a useful and productive foray into a space in which Chaucer and contemporary philosophies can exist together, framed in such a way to avoid questions of anachronism. It directs towards more engagement with ideas that ultimately have wider social and political implications to how we view medieval people’s conceptualizations of themselves and their ethical relationships with others. Indeed, it speaks to a greater sense of human experience as a whole, to establishing these ethical lenses that Ashe brings into focus as transhistorically significant.