For the biographer, Geoffrey Chaucer is at best a conundrum and at worst a nightmare. On the surface there is much to recommend him as a subject. He is widely known (for many he is the only medieval author they can name) and, somewhat unusually for a medieval figure, there is a surprisingly large amount of documentary evidence about his life. Nearly 500 “life-records” survive, detailing his work as a page, a diplomat (he made fourteen trips abroad), a soldier, a tax collector and a clerk of works. They tell us that he was the victim of highway robbery in Kent in 1390, and that in his youth he was taken hostage in France. But not one of these rich and varied documents refers to his activities as a poet. His poetry only survives in manuscripts copied after his death, many of which contain incomplete texts that are hard to date.

Chaucer made it his habit to be unknowable, adopting in his work a playful, obfuscating persona. Several of his poems are dream visions operating in liminal fictive spaces, recounted by bleary-eyed narrators who don’t quite understand what it is they have witnessed. His masterwork, The Canterbury Tales, is about the drama of telling stories and the disjunction between the teller and the tale. In a great comic moment, one of the pilgrims, the Man of Law, refers to “Chaucer, thogh he kan but lewedly / On metres and on ryming craftily” (Chaucer, though he is ignorant / Of meter and of rhyming skilfully). It’s one of countless times that we feel Chaucer is winking at his audience. Often we come away with the feeling that the joke is on us.

Mary Flannery’s Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the merry bard deftly tackles the problems with its subject. The result is both scholarly and readable, a crisp and concise addition to the long line of Chaucer biographies. Its focus is on the poet’s “life and work in relation to his reputation for mirth and merriment”. Not all of his writings conform to that reputation. He wrote sober works of religious instruction (“The Second Nun’s Tale”, “An ABC”), a piece of deeply uncomfortable antisemitism (“The Prioress’s Tale”) and a guide to using an astrolabe that is about as merry as a flat-pack furniture assembly manual. But the average reader is unlikely to have heard of these. They are more likely to...