I am currently finishing my first monograph, Mercurial Natures: Chaucer’s Trans Poetics, a literary history of bodily and textual mutability in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. Across four chapters and two interstitial fragments, I argue that Chaucer uses a specifically medieval understanding of gendered embodiment as essentially flexible to explore the ethics of literary interpretation. The project takes the literary body as its polestar to constellate medieval hermeneutics alongside concerns made possible in transgender studies about reading and the legibility of personhood. The book examines several figures and tales from The Canterbury Tales, including the tales and portraits of pilgrims like the Pardoner, the Wife of Bath, and the Canon’s Yeoman, and figures that offer a gendered maximalism such as Alisoun and Absolon in The Miller’s Tale. While a specific tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales acts as the anchor for each chapter, I draw on Chaucer’s dream visions, short poems, and the larger tradition of Troilus and Criseyde to buoy my readings of the Canterbury Tales. The chapters also gesture to Chaucer’s contemporary poetic environment; chapter two, for instance, interfaces Chaucer and John Gower’s alternate visions of alchemy, and chapter three brings the capacious “secrets of women” tradition to bear on Chaucer’s configuration of Alisoun in The Miller’s Tale. Thecentral motivation of Mercurial Natures is to show how gender as a relational category is central to Chaucer’s literary project.