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language. She brings in the relicta trope: Chaucer’s abandoned women try both to say and have what they want, but they fail, and their imperfect expressions give rise to misunderstandings. She alleges that Chaucer’s narrator emphasizes the women’s lack of Latin and of phalluses, their weaknesses. The early fifteenth-century Sowdone of Babylon presents a different yet comparable case, of the belle sarrasin. This romance’s heroine is similar to those of Chaucer in her absence of masculine power. Yet Allen-Goss sees a difference: the author of the romance, unlike Chaucer, makes positive room for female desire that does not conform to patriarchal standards, in the process calling into question the logic of colonization. The final two chapters have less obvious connection to one another than do the previous four. Allen-Goss’s exploration of Chaucer’s Thisbe and Ariadne continues her discussion of phallic power and its lack. In his telling of Thisbe’s story, she sees Chaucer as questioning female desire as an impulse, but in his telling of Ariadne’s, she contends, he again exposes women as unable to make meaning or effectively use masculine language. Allen-Goss deems Chaucer’s project in theLegend of GoodWomen of consideringwhat and howwomenwant ultimately hopeless. She connects the late fifteenth-century romance Undo Your Door to the other poems she examines by locating it in a tradition of subversive Chaucerian writing, for the romance’s princess heroine has legible desires, and some of them find satisfaction in the plot. Allen-Goss’s conclusions about the romance seem more optimistic than those about Chaucer as she finds that Undo Your Door frees female desires from an oppressive masculinist orientation. In each instance of textual interpretation described above, Allen-Goss gives much useful and accurate historical and linguistic information to contextualize the literary passages she works with. She also lets questions in, and not always to answer them, which allows her to generate possibilities for futurework thatmight build onwhat she has assembled here.At the same time,AllenGoss constantly deploys numerous different critical theories of language and gender. Indeed, the density and variety of her approachmake it difficult to summarize clearly and succinctly in a brief review.For instance,Allen-Gossdiscusses theMorteArthure aspost-traumatic andUndoYourDoor in terms of its portrayals of technology, à la DonnaHaraway (195). She displays a firm command of this theoretical terminology, but her writing will almost instantly lose readers who know the literary works and historical context but have not mastered the theory. Her critical approach should inspire readers to learn more, though. Indeed, Allen-Goss demonstrates and stimulates both writerly and readerly bravery: she eschews the term queer for the most part because, as she explains, it accords all too well with sexist and homophobic medieval attitudes (viii). Meanwhile, she uses the words “hermeneutic” and “mansplain” in the same sentence at one point (191). The resulting style almost forces the reader to notice and reevaluate the sexual power dynamics that structure scholarly language. Ultimately, Allen-Goss has intentionally chosen a vocabulary that supports her deconstructionist and feminist/queer strategies of reading between the lines to open up old texts to new interpretations.