Chaucer: A European Life. Marion Turner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. xx + 600 pp. $39.95

While biography by its nature follows the chronology of the subject's life, Turner has taken the innovative approach of focusing on space, not time, as the governing principle of her book. Through impressive analysis of primary sources she re-creates both the physical and imagined spaces that Chaucer inhabited over the course of his lifetime, and uses these spaces as lenses through which to understand better Chaucer's literary works: “I am interested in how Chaucer's habits of mind, conditioned by the world in which he lived, are expressed in his writing” (366). Significantly, however, she supports her reading of Chaucer's literary imagination through magisterial contextual analysis and philological acumen.