A new interpretation in which Foster (English, Whitman College) synthesizes past critical studies on the 14th-century English writer's entire canon. He highlights the various expressions in the several poems of the interpretation of dreams, the approximation of truth, gentilesse, the limitation of teachers, the tellable truth and the paradigm lost. He approaches interpreting Chaucer's work as a metaphor for interpreting the very world that generates the need for textual interpretation. He assumes a reading knowledge of Middle English.