THIS COLLECTION CONTAINS two kinds of essays: sixteen main essays (in four parts), which consider how a single word from Chaucer's vast corpus functions in one or more of his works, and four response essays, which demonstrate how ideas from essays in each part might be combined. A focus on individual words from Chaucer's corpus might initially seem like an old-fashioned approach for a Companion, a remnant of New Critical reading practices. Most Companions tend to frame discussion of an author's work through theoretical approaches, historical contexts, and broad, key concepts, and, in some sense, we fit into the last of these categories. However, we also see these words as carrying their histories with them, traversing time and space so as to engage with contemporary modes of thinking. For us, these words both remind us of the historical distance between Chaucer's concepts and our own and allow us to build connections to the pressing issues of our own moment.

We also wanted to model how to write about Chaucer. We thought about Chaucer's words as a prompt for writing, a starting point from which his readers could dilate and create. Academic writing, after all, “is not the memorialization of ideas. Writing distills, crafts, and pressure-tests ideas—it creates ideas.” The main essays illustrate a wide range of potential ways of writing about Chaucer, embracing different styles, historical approaches, and theoretical concerns; the response essays explore different methods of engaging with academic writing, expanding the creative process which Chaucer's words had prompted. We began with a very long list of Chaucerian words that we believed offered creative entry points into Chaucer's canon. Some of these were chosen because Chaucer uses them often; others, because Chaucer's usage of them is the first in Middle English; still others, because they are keywords (as Christopher Cannon calls them in his Foreword) for larger arenas of thought, medieval or modern. We then invited scholars to select a word (one from our list or of their own devising) as the basis for a main essay. Because our contributors could follow their ideas in whatever direction they developed, their essays model the discovery, energy, and pleasure all evident in the best academic writing.