One of the most useful truisms in the study of literary reception – of the ways in which texts are read in times and places other than their own – is that reception has two aspects: it reveals something about the text itself and something about its new readers or critics. The most secure and satisfying reception-study finds these two aspects mutually explanatory. The assumption, at any rate, is that different ages or cultures do not so much misread a great text as make from it special abstractions, acutely suited to their particular concerns. The text that survives from age to age, receiving variant and sometimes antithetical interpretations, is typically not so much a compendium of perdurable truths that are sometimes misunderstood and sometimes distorted, but a structure so richly and complexly organized that different cultures, different audiences, can re-orient it (rotate it three-dimensionally as one might rotate an image in a computer) and then interpret it in ways that, however special, do answer to the work. The interpretation may often represent a very limited reception, depending on the limits of the receiving apparatus; but it receives something that is, after all, there. It responds to, and reveals, both aspects of the situation at once.

This, at least, has for a long time been the finding of leading students of the Chaucer tradition.