In the closing sentence of Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (1987), Donald Roy Howard writes: "One must think of the world while one is in the world; facing eternity, our thoughts become closed within the self, our words become silence, and all our works upon this little spot of earth seem like the waves of the sea." Howard might well have been writing about the close of his own life instead of Geoffrey Chaucer's, for Howard did not live to see the publication of the biography--the capstone of his career. Howard's lifetime of study and his keen mind enabled him, according to a memorial tribute in Speculum (July 1988), to "come as close as anyone could to knowing--what Chaucer did think and experience." In all Howard's writing, whether for specialized or general audiences, he endeavored to recreate fourteenth-century England because he was convinced that in that world lay...