Situating a biography of Chaucer—the “Father of English Literature” (507)—within a European context makes a powerful statement. Marion Turner's Chaucer: A European Life enchantingly weaves Chaucer's life and poetry between the local spaces of households, gardens, and inns, as well as the international spaces of French castles under siege, Italian libraries, and Mediterranean marketplaces. The Chaucer revivified here is neither a product nor a representative solely of England; he belongs to the whole of Europe.

Chaucer: A European Life is a spatial biography, which explores the poet's “imaginative development” (3)—that is, how Chaucer's poetic capacity developed within his material and spatial contexts. Turner situates Chaucer's life and literary imagination within illustrative anecdotes about spaces and material cultures of London and parts of broader Europe in an unprecedented level of detail. This is nonetheless also a literary biography, invested in the outcomes of Chaucer's poetry and other writings. Turner asks very particular questions that illuminate Chaucer's poetry through material realities; for example, she asks, “What did a cushion mean to a fourteenth-century reader?” (5), to think about a line from Troilus and Criseyde: “And with that word he for a quysshen ran” (The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson [1987], book III, line 964). Turner works through distinct physical spaces in geographical (London, Reims, Florence) and architectural senses (counting house, Tower of London, Tabard Inn), but also abstract, ideological spaces (“cage,” “Milky Way,” “empire”). Chaucer—a diplomat raised in the London ward most densely populated by immigrants—becomes an ally of diverse voices, in contrast to xenophobic merchants, authoritarian kings, speakers of the House of Commons, and even the singular authorial voice typical of courtly literary genres. This fuels Turner's positioning of The Canterbury Tales as a groundbreaking reimagining of how poetry could manifest multiple perspectives.

Turner begins with a general prologue and provides each of three sections a prologue of its own. The first part, “Becoming,” spans Chaucer's first three decades, from his birth in London around 1342, through wide-ranging travels around England and Europe, to his return to London in 1373. Of particular importance, chapter 5 (“Lancaster”) untangles Chaucer's personal and professional relationship to John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Chaucer himself, his wife Philippa, and Philippa's sister Katherine all were employed in the Lancaster household under John of Gaunt, and their families became further entangled by Gaunt's affair with (and eventual marriage to) Katherine. Their collective fourteen surviving children—between Geoffrey and Philippa, Gaunt and Katherine, and from Gaunt and Katherine's previous marriages—repeatedly appear in the volume: becoming nuns, serving in the Lancastrian army, inspiring Chaucer to write Treatise on the Astrolabe, generating courtly sex scandals, marrying a king, becoming a king, and possibly even murdering a king. The details of these stories augment Turner's immersion of the reader in Chaucer's world and illustrate his deep imbrication with the house of Lancaster.

The book's second part, “Being,” dwells within the late 1370s through mid-1380s, moving from space to space (rather than year to year) to gain various vantage points on the tumultuous period in which Chaucer produced his early works. Of particular note is Turner's handling of sexual violence. This book calls out rape by name in discussions of Troilus and Criseyde, the “Reeve's Tale,” and the “Wife of Bath's Tale,” where many scholars shy away from such blunt language. Perhaps the most challenging part of any Chaucerian biography is Cecily Champaigne's legal release of Chaucer from alleged “‘raptus’: almost certainly an accusation of sexual rape” (211). Turner allows for the likelihood that Chaucer committed horrible deeds alongside assertions that Chaucer matured in his representation of women. In particular, chapters 11 and 18 (“Troy” and “What Lies Beneath”) skillfully unpack Chaucer's developing views of female sexual agency and condemnation of rape in the Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, the “Knight's Tale,” and the “Wife of Bath's Tale.” Nothing is sugarcoated, even if there are moments later in the volume when a hearkening back to the Cecily Champaigne case would have lent much-needed nuance to Chaucer's later attitudes toward women. Indeed, because Turner so insistently praises the elder Chaucer's favoring of diverse perspectives—most pertinently, those of women—the book only incompletely reconciles the older Chaucer's advocacy for women's agency with the allegations of his earlier life.

The biography's final part, “Approaching Canterbury,” satisfies promises made in earlier chapters to discuss the Canterbury Tales in more depth. The Tales loom large over the book as a whole, and Turner conveys a clear admiration of them as the pinnacle of Chaucer's oeuvre. Interwoven with literary arguments about the dates texts were written and the audiences they were written for, warfare and political machinations are narrated at an exhilarating (if sometimes dizzying) pace, while Turner draws into the foreground often unnoticed parts of Chaucer's life, such as his time as a desk-based forester in the 1390s (417–21).

Few concerns arise in the reading of this book. Generally, reminders of names and relationships serve well to help the reader navigate family lines, succession claims, and political allegiances. In a couple of cases, though, the use of variant names without explanation hinders understanding: for example, Jean/John II of France (77–78) or Henry IV/Bolingbroke/Derby (448–49, 483–85). Additionally, while Turner is generally quite attentive to the changes Chaucer makes from his sources in, for example, the “Wife of Bath's Tale” (422–23) or the “Manciple's Tale” (474–75), her discussion of Chaucer's Boece, a translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, conspicuously lacks nuanced exploration of how Chaucer's Middle English differs from Boethius's Latin, muddling distinctions between what Chaucer innovated and what he received from the sixth-century source (197–203, 461).

For readers at all levels, multiple maps and family trees will prove helpful. Turner states a desire for a broad audience (8), but that is potentially impeded by the infrequency with which Turner assists readers with Middle English. While perfectly reasonable in a scholarly context, this may obstruct the understanding of any reader not comfortable with Middle English or well versed in Chaucer's poetry. Nonetheless, Turner presents an accessibly written tome, generally free of minor errors, that retains the rigor of its archival, historical, and literary scholarship. The book's length makes it daunting, but its content is crucial and rewarding for any current or future student of medieval literature—and luckily for us, Turner's style both educates and delights.