Hastings' succinct retelling of seven of Chaucer's 23 tales is lively, respectful of the originals - and quite satisfactory. Cohen's lengthier version of four of them is outstanding. Chaucer's "words are best," says Cohen in her excellent prologue, but "almost like a foreign tongue." So, as she expands in a concluding "Apologia," she has taken liberties, trying to convey his informality and immediacy plus the 14th-century culture that was his setting While she has made substantial cuts and resorted to prose, she has not changed meaning; and she has retained the substantial prologues that so delightfully link the stories to the characters of their tellers: that garrulous, sensible, voluptuous, wise old feminist, the Wife of Bath, with her story based on the precept that women's dearest wish is to rule men; the simple, generous Franklin, with his homely interpolations and innocently egalitarian notions; the slimy Pardoner, who begins his tale with an earthy tirade on sins to avoid and closes with a modern-sounding commercial f...