The section on Thomas Becket includes a letter from Becket to the Empress Matilda (daughter of king Henry I) who was based in Rouen at the time, and one from the Empress in response, reprimanding Becket for his behaviour towards her son, Henry II. The second part contains two parallel excerpts from the accounts, by Edward Grim and William Fitzstephen, of the murder of Becket in Canterbury cathedral in 1170.

The theme of safe-guarding, accidents and death is demonstrated by reference to the bishops’ advice regarding the protection of babies, and the necessary measures to be taken in case of illness and death, including emergency baptism and Caesarean section. Accidents often occurred, especially to children, and this might lead, in more fortunate cases, to healing and even revival by means of a miracle. Miracle accounts are balanced by coroners’ accounts which record the details of death, often by misadventure, as in the case here of a young woman scalded to death by falling into a brewer’s vat.

Chapter 4 investigates how classical ideals of generosity were utilised by writers of saints’ lives in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. It focuses on the case of Thomas Becket’s literary afterlife and the ways in which hagiographers sought to reframe his reputation for largesse in a spiritual direction. The chapter concludes by looking at the influence of this model on the saints’ lives of thirteenth-century England.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

Although much about holiness in Chaucer’s works remains disputed, elliptical, or even contradictory, many of his images of religious devotion and popular piety are themselves situated in a broader cultural context than is usually recognised. For Chaucer, as for most late medieval Christians of his day, holiness was instantiated in matter, present and manifest in shrines, relics, holy objects and in the natural world, and he shows himself attentive to such materiality in his images of popular religion. Many of the Tales celebrate orthodox Christian materiality in ways that align his devotional interests with those found in a broad range of English religious writings by authors with whom he is not typically connected, including Julian of Norwich and the Carthusian Nicholas Love. Other Tales offer an incisive critique of holiness in the context of contemporary practices within the Church. Chaucer’s many-sided works hold these glimmering tensions in balance.