Critical disagreements about Chaucer arise from divergent assumptions about who or what determines his narratives: life-like characters, doctrinal principles, the cycles of history, material conditions, the prototypical subject, the reader, even the text itself. "Chaucer"s Agents" shifts our focus from particular kinds of cause to the representation of cause itself - that is, to agency. Using modern theories from various disciplines, Van Dyke analyzes agency with particular reference to narrative. She then argues that Chaucer"s career intersects with crises in political, metaphysical, and authorial agency. In successive chapters, she explores various kinds of Chaucerian agents: allegorical realities, intelligent animals, pagan gods, women (as religious exemplars and as subversive subjects), and the author. Each chapter surveys medieval conceptions of the agency in question and then follows that kind of agent through representative Chaucerian texts, showing how Chaucer"s answers to questions about causation shape, and even constitute, his narratives. Carolynn Van Dyke is Francis A. March Professor of English at Lafayette College.