"Pugh’s willingness to kick Chaucer off his pedestal is a refreshing departure from staid scholarship on the poet, but it’s clear that Pugh’s criticisms stem from a deep love for his subject, warts and all. The result is an unusually lively take on the medieval classic."
— Publishers Weekly
“Reading from the contemporary perspective of most students, this ‘bad book’ on Chaucer uses the very frustrations of modern audiences as well as Chaucer’s own falterings in genre and characterization to reveal what is both insightful and enjoyable in the Canterbury Tales. With its original way of organizing and cross-referencing its sections both chronologically and thematically, the book gives its own readers different pathways into Chaucer’s otherwise frustrating or confusing stories.”
— Elizabeth Scala, University of Texas at Austin
"Pugh offers insightful readings of the tales and explores their reception by both medieval and modern audiences. Pugh’s clever title anticipates the lively tone of his scholarship, which is both engaging and significant. . . Highly recommended."— Choice
“Pugh’s para-fanfiction is a savvy and erudite response to those moments in the Canterbury Tales that disturb the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief by making them stumble: continuity errors, clichés, contradictions, narrative irresolutions, the genre trouble of the Knight’s Tale, the purposeful, so-bad-it’s-good infelicities of Sir Thopas, or the troubling antisemitism of the Prioress’s Tale. Pugh does not develop a theory of antiaesthetics but rather anatomizes the reader’s disquieting sense that in Chaucer things sometimes don’t add up.”
— Ruth Evans, Saint Louis University
“Bad Chaucer’s best features are its provocative starting point and its comprehensive commitment to identifying ‘a wider range of lapses and blunders in such topics as thematic consistency, narrative coherency, and character development’ in each of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, even the ones that are frequently overlooked by critics. The author has an impressively broad and comprehensive knowledge of Chaucerian texts and criticism. The writing is lucid, lively, and graceful.”
— Carissa Harris, Temple University