This issue of the Chaucer Review?Volume 37.1?is the first to emerge with out the indomitable editorial steerage of Robert W. Frank, Jr. At thirty-six years old, the journal now begins a new phase, new despite the fact that we as its new editors wish, with all humility and dedication, to carry for ward in its pages Bob Frank's inimitably humane, learned esprit The prospect for a new phase in the life of the Chaucer Review is both exciting and daunting. One wants to approach it rather conservatively because of the journal's important place in medieval studies as a forum for scholars and readers of the Middle English canon (broadly conceived), and, espe cially, of the traditions, controversies, literary/political associations, and multi-lingual, multi-national, multi-temporal contexts of the master poet Geoffrey Chaucer. At the same time, a new beginning offers just that: a time for heightened reevaluation, vigorous renewal, and discerning reassessment of all the literate, critical, and theoretical directions that readers, scribes, editors, and scholars of Chaucer?and related texts? have forged in the past six hundred or so years. In the Bibliography of the First 30 Years of The Chaucer Review, Peter G. Beidler and Martha A. Kalnan aptly note how Bob Frank has "shepherded two generations of Chaucer scholars?more than 550 of them?into print"1 That number now exceeds 650. As founding co-editors, Robert Frank and Edmund Reiss launched the inaugural issue in the summer of 1966, and there they explained their intent?"bringing confortand mirthe"?in the cre ation of a new journal dedicated to Chaucer studies. It was to provide "a forum for the responsible discussion of the approaches to medieval litera ture and interpretations of Chaucer's writings.''2 To this end, they promised that they would "not hesitate to print the controversial," adding that