This dissertation argues that Chaucer primes readers to confront pressing questions about the ethics of literary representation and the nature of interpretation by thinking biographically, of the author’s crimes against women. He does so by reappropriating a set of critical tools from the medieval commentary tradition, specifically the scenario on which the repentant narrative of the Ovidian biography hinged: that of a woman reader encountering a work that was never intended for her. Unlike Ovid and his medieval commentators, who defend morally dubious poetic content by deflecting blame onto this feminized figure or by claiming to reveal the deeper moral meaning she cannot see, Chaucer revalues this feminized figure and her supposed hermeneutic faults. Rather than simply dismissing the moral concerns about fictive mimesis which the unanticipated woman reader had been invented to address, however, Chaucer follows the woman reader’s gaze and finds that ethical reflection can be conducted narratively, without moralizing commentary: at times her prurient and literal-minded mode of interpretation is precisely what his poetry requires. For Chaucer, the moral value of a work does not inhere in what the work represents, or in a moral that is prescribed to neutralize morally dubious content, so much as in what it does not represent: the narrative gaps and fissures which present themselves to the imaginative reader for further reflection. So understood, Chaucer harnesses performed authorial biography to reject simplistic concerns with fiction’s imitative potential and to make the reader a co-creator in meaning, even as he acknowledges the author’s responsibility to help facilitate ethical modes of readerly engagement.