Chaucer's "legal Fiction"

For centuries, Chaucer has been associated with law. This study, however, is concerned less with the overt in Chaucer that concerns law than with the concealed and private: a specific body of materials -- records from the medieval English law courts that the poet evidently read, studied, discussed with colleagues, and then threaded into his texts. This book examines the effects of those documents on the so-called "minor" poems, The House of Fame, and The Canterbury Tales.