Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated. In this anxiety, Chaucer toward the end of his life, in his envoy to the Parson’s Tale, was moved to “revoke” his life’s work—The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Book of the Duchess, and all the poems that were not pious—and to beg Christ to forgive him for writing these “worldly vanities … so that I may be one of those at the day
