Venus' Owne Clerk: Chaucer's Debt to the Confessio Amantis. By B. W. Lindeboom. Costerus New Series, 167. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. Pp. viii + 477. $135.

In this book, B. W. Lindeboom offers a thought-provoking assessment of the relationship between the two major English works by Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. The ambitious study brings the two poets together in a new way, offering more than a detailed explication of the loci classici of previous critical discussions of Gower/Chaucer literary exchange. While many readers have seen the discrete points of convergence between the writers' works as evidence of a poetic rivalry or even traces of a "quarrel" between friends, Lindeboom draws comparisons between the writers in order to give insight into Chaucer's ever-shifting compositional process. the argument in this book is two-fold: first, Chaucer radically altered his grand plan for The Canterbury Tales in the 1390s sometime after reading Gower's Confessio Amantis; second, Chaucer experimented with transforming the Tales along an expressly Gowerian model. In order to support this second claim, Lindeboom focuses on the significant structural similarities between the sermonlike performances of Chaucer's Wife of bath and Pardoner.