"Species, Phantasms and Images situates Chaucer's poetry within a number of discourse communities that have not generally been recognized as the intellectual context of Chaucer's work and creates new and significantly different interpretations of a number of individual tales. Offering new and innovative perspectives, Collette's discussion reveals a previously unrecognized topos centered in the effect of sensory-based imagination on human relationships in The Canterbury Tales.

This topos of sight and imagination bears directly on how Chaucer understood the human body and how his audience understood the effect of individual imagination on dynamic relationships."--BOOK JACKET.