The works of Chaucer gave rise to a diversity of traditions of both creative response and critical commentary, to subsequent ‘Chaucerian’ authors, and to a body of comment about Chaucer's writings, one of the longest continuous critical traditions in vernacular European literature. It was Chaucer who began it. For Chaucer was both the first English author to conceive of his writings as a whole oeuvre and the first so clearly to have thought of his works as having a posterity. In the two Prologues to the Legend of Good Women (F, 417ff., G, 405ff.), the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale (11, 46–76), and in the Retractions at the close of the Canterbury Tales (x, 1081–92), Chaucer lists his writings – in recollecting, ‘collects’ them – as an assembled corpus of individual work. At the close of Troilus and Criseyde he envisages a future for his writing in relation to the past, when he bids his poem follow in the footsteps of the ancient poets, but also worries about textual transmission and future interpretation. This collection of essays on ‘Chaucer traditions’ is devoted to topics in the first three centuries of imitation and re-creation by subsequent authors, a period brought to a close by those verse translations or modernizations of Chaucer by Dryden in his Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), which register how understanding of Chaucer's language has changed, just as Dryden's Preface to the Fables marks a transition in critical interpretation of Chaucer.