Samantha Katz Seal is an Associate Professor of English and the Pamela Shulman Professor of European and Holocaust Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She has been an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and a Visiting Scholar in Harvard University's Medieval Studies Program.

• Introduction: The Dream of Father Chaucer


• Part I. On Certainty


• 1: Sexual Exegetics and the Female Text


• 2: The Uneasy Institution: Lineage and the Wife of Bath


• Part II. On Creation


• 3: Uncertain Labor: Conception and the Problem of Productivity


• 4: Adultery's Heirs: Multiplying Excess


• Part III: On Likeness


• 5: Almost Heirs: Daughters and Disappointments


• 6: Father Chaucer's Heirs

This volume offers a fresh interpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer both as a poet and as a man. Taking as its starting point the idea of Chaucer as the 'Father of English Poetry', the book explores how the poet's thoughts on paternity and creativity lie at the heart of The Canterbury Tales.