This chapter groups discussion of The Man of Law’s Tale into four broad topics. First is the intersecting representation of gender, race, and religious difference through which the tale complicates key questions about Christianity’s relationship to Islam, a relationship shaped as much by political and economic concerns as by theological ones. It thus opens equally complicated questions about the relationship between sacred and secular. Third is the tale’s preoccupation with the circulation of people and knowledge. Despite its generic similarity to saints’ Lives, the tale is perhaps less concerned with the truth of Christianity than with its transmission, with questions about the kind of knowledge stories produce, especially as they move across different discursive and territorial frames. The final section turns to narrative presentation and the teller’s status as a “Man of Law.” As an exploration of the impossibility of superimposing a stable system of meaning on a story about overlapping networks of mercantile, confessional, historical, and narrative practices, the tale has much to teach us about the layered, multipart narrative project of the Canterbury Tales itself.

What should we do about the fact that reading Chaucer is hard? The “immersion theory” of learning Middle English, rooted in nineteenth-century philological approaches, is no longer really functional or well-suited to attract our wider and more diverse contemporary audience of students; we might return, productively if paradoxically, to an earlier appreciation of textual difficulty (and reward), which we actually share with our Modernist colleagues. In this we can make translations our allies rather than our antagonists. Moreover, the stereotypes about the Middle Ages that we have traditionally railed against, from “dark-ages” dismissals to pre-Raphaelite romanticizations, may no longer be the ones our twenty-first-century students carry with them these days.

The eighty-four surviving manuscripts containing all or part of the Canterbury Tales present something of a headache for modern editors of the work, who must select from among these competing authorities in order to present the work in a single form. But this large number of diverse copies, and the nine extant fragments that probably attest to once-complete MSS, can tell us much about the way Chaucer’s work was read and repackaged in the century following his death. When we look beyond the famous Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, early and authoritative witnesses to Chaucer’s text, we discover that just as valuable are the so-called “bad texts,” with their abundance of scribal readings, linking passages, and rearrangements of the tales; copies like these have much to tell us about scribal attitudes to Chaucer’s work and its reception and about the development and professionalization of the London book trade.

Chaucerians seeking financial support for their research endeavors need to be cautious about using the appeal to enduring humanistic values, since they can be used both to deracinate and to trivialize what we do (even by our allies). More particular and specific arguments based on an ongoing and dynamic relation between past and present are both truer to the enterprise and, in the end, more compelling to contemporary audiences.

This chapter seeks to justify and explain the Wife of Bath’s prominence among the Canterbury pilgrims as the representative of Chaucer’s powers of representation and as the anchor of the debate on marriage witnessed across a number of tales. As a source of dramatic intensity and thematic richness, the Wife offers an argumentative and autobiographical anti-clerical prologue and a redemptive romance that complicate received ideas of women’s value in marriage. She demonstrates the Wife’s stereotypically “feminine” foibles and her radically feminist thought, which turn our neat conceptions of masculine and feminine, active and passive, spiritual and worldly, on their head. The chapter argues for the Wife’s disruptive power in the Canterbury Tales.

Professional teaching and research devoted to the Canterbury Tales largely developed within the modern research university, and that’s where most students of Chaucer learn the disciplinary languages necessary for participation in the field – Middle English and some of its dialects, a little Latin and French, and the discourses of contemporary literary and cultural criticism. But the institutions that house such study are also the site of administrative, curricular, and budgetary decisions that necessarily affect, at one remove or another, work in the field, so ideally Chaucerians and prospective Chaucerians should acquaint themselves as well with the various institutional languages that can be used to recruit attention, resources, and allies to the cause. Becoming more fluent in the campus languages of success, of assessment, and of strategic plans and self-promotion puts us in the position to more effectively help colleagues, administrators, and students understand the answers they get when they ask the question “why Chaucer?”

Drees examines a science-inspired naturalism that endorses a fully naturalistic view of reality, but does not exclude religious experience as a category of human experience. He considers some exceptional experiences that apparently conflict with natural events and experiences that coincide with affective responses, such as awe and wonder, proposing that the relevant exceptional experiences and affective experiences are explainable, at least in principle, within a naturalistic purview.

Wettstein examines religious experience from the ancient Jewish perspective of the book of Job, in particular its whirlwind passage where Job is left not with a full explanation of God's ways but instead with a poetic illumination of meaning. Job receives a vision from God that can free him from his own suffering by redirecting him to some joy-enhancing features of the world that also bears crushing evil unexplained by humans.

Webb considers that religious experience typically occurs in the setting of a religion as a social institution, and that the subjects of such an experience typically participate in rituals and ceremonies with other people who share some of their beliefs and convictions. He proposes that this social-embedding of religious experiences is significant with regard to their being understood and evaluated, including in connection with their contribution to the meaning of human life.

Clooney focus on Ramanuja on religious experience as based in the contemplation of Hindu scripture, in tradition, and in ritual practice, and as offering a vision of the divine and of union of the human self with the divine. He suggests that Ramanuja’s work provides an “integrated Vedanta” that supplies the cognitive and affective components for one to move toward an intense spiritual existence in life.

Taves examines some approaches from the psychology of religion to religious experience, focusing on the psychology of religion as represented by researchers associated with the International Association for the Psychology of Religion and the American Psychological Association’s Division 36. She suggests that psychology of religion can treat its subject matter of religious experience as an object in its own right or as something related to another important state, such as depression.

The Introduction identifies some important questions about religious experience, and it considers Tolstoy's position that relates religious experience to the meaning of human life. It also comments on the relation between religious experience and evidence for God's existence and on the bearing of science on religious experience. In addition, it looks at the bearing of religious disagreement on religious experience. Finally, the Introduction offers summaries of the book's chapters.