Writing about Chaucer and religion is a very different matter from writing about, for instance, T. S. Eliot and religion. For Eliot, Christianity, in the form of high Anglicanism, was an option that he embraced as a living faith, and that increasingly shaped and coloured his poetry. His task, in an unashamedly materialist and increasingly agnostic or atheist world, was to find a poetic language that would convey the thoughts and feelings that informed that faith even to those who did not share it: to make space for religion in a world that saw no need for it. For Chaucer, Christianity was a given, and faith was effectively the only option available. It presented itself to him primarily as the medium in which he and his society lived and worked. For a few of his contemporaries, it was as an all-absorbing spiritual devotion; for everybody, it was the basis of their work and their play, of economics and politics and medicine and science and the arts. Most people would never have seen a picture or a sculpture that was not religious in subject, or had a holiday that was not marked out as a holy day.

That very saturation of the culture in religion, however, can make it seem as if religion were merely a pre-scientific way of talking about the same things that drive the modern world: as if medieval expressions of devotion were merely the surface gloss on phenomena that were in fact economic, sociological or political, or even pathological. For all the new visibility given to religion and religious practices in the modern study of the past, it remains almost part of our scholarly credentials not to treat religious conviction seriously. The assumption seems to be that whatever the medieval ego may pretend to itself about pious motivation, the medieval id always had its fist deep in the till, grubbing for money or for power. No doubt that was often true, and Chaucer generously confirms our suspicions; but he also reminds us, if we read him whole, that it is too easy just to transfer back into the past our own secular assumptions about what ‘really’ drove individuals.