Chaucer's Prayers

Megan Murton's slim but sharp monograph makes a genuinely fresh case: prayer is not a sidebar in Chaucer's work but a unifying thread that runs through religious and secular poems alike. By treating those prayers as performative utterances that pull readers into a shared first-person voice, Murton reframes Chaucer as a poet seriously engaged with the sacred — a claim peer reviewers in the field found convincing. The strength is the originality of the argument and its grounding in medieval devotional culture. The honest caveat is that this is a specialist text in every sense — dense prose, a ~$99 price tag, and 180 pages aimed squarely at graduate students and medievalists. If that's your world, it's well worth the read. Everyone else will want to wait for a library copy.