This collection of essays surveys the diverse receptions and workings of Chaucer from the early 16th to the early 17th century. It emphasizes the many kinds of influence that Chaucer and his poems exerted on British letters and culture during these years and assesses how ""Chaucer""-poet, works and representations by others became a cultural category that changed in Tudor and early Jacobean England, as the Reformation and increasing distance from Middle English made Chaucer representative of a lost medieval past.