Analysis

Nearly everything Chaucer mentions among the books he revokes are imbued with or shot through with religious feeling, however secular the subject matter might be. Why Chaucer wrote his retraction is not clear. Many wish he had not. Nevertheless, whether from religious terror or for the sake of playing it safe with God, Chaucer canceled all of his secular writings. Curiously, he did not burn the work he thought most sinful, and he let the revocation stand in the same book with the poems “that sownen into synne.”