This course takes a close look at some of the bawdy, irreverent, and even dangerous texts written in fourteenth-century England by Geoffrey Chaucer. As he recounts erotic dreams, tells the story of a faithless woman in Troilus and Criseyde, and narrates tales told on a riotous, drunken pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer repeatedly tells his readers not to blame him for what he writes. Students in this course will ask: who is to blame, if not the author himself?