Chaucer’s final statement about his writings turns out to be so tightly intertwined with an act of prayer that the two cannot be separated: the Retraction asks to be prayed, not read, and to pray this text is to be formed into a certain kind of reader of Chaucer’s works. This intertwining of the literary and the devotional has a particular significance in the writings of Chaucer, because he is so often seen as the most secular of medieval English poets. There is a long-standing critical tradition of describing him as uninterested in transcendent truth-claims and urbanely detached from, even skeptical of, the religious beliefs and practices of his world. This tradition extends all the way back to the Reformation: much as the sixteenth century recast England’s founding poet as a proto-Protestant, modern-day readers tend to remake him in their own post-Christian image, and these readings are two facets of the same secularizing approach. To see Chaucer as prophetically secular is to make him an exceptional figure, standing apart from, and indeed above, his contemporaries. This too is a critical tradition, dating to the fifteenth-century poets who lionized Chaucer as the inimitable founder of English Poetry.

Much recent criticism has worked against Chaucerian exceptionalism in its various forms, moving toward a deeper embedding of Chaucer and his works in their contemporary contexts, but secularity is one respect in which Chaucer is still often seen as unique. This book’s reading of the Retraction challenges that idea, proposing that Chaucer did not draw a sharp dividing line between poetic creativity and religious faith. The Retraction’s final clauses transcend their literary context to script a prayer for salvation that any medieval reader could inhabit, and crucially, inhabiting that prayer sends the reader back into the poetry, enabled to navigate its “worldly vanitees” in search of the “doctrine” that Chaucer has promised is there (X 1082–84). Nor is the Retraction the only moment of intersection between Chaucer’s works and the devotional culture in which he and his readers participated. In the “ABC” Chaucer joins the ranks of poets, largely anonymous, who composed lyric prayers for others to use, and the fact that this text is a poetically sophisticated adaptation of a French source does not make it any less practically useful.