Laura Ashe is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Worcester College. An undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, she held a Kennedy Memorial Scholarship at Harvard University before returning to Cambridge for doctoral study. She was appointed Junior Research Fellow at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and then Lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London, before coming to Oxford. She has published numerous books and articles, working on English and European literature, history, culture and ideas across the Middle Ages from the tenth to the seventeenth century.

Chaucer's Ethical Philosophy argues that Chaucer's fictions engage with the most urgent questions of modern political and moral philosophy. Close analysis of Troilus and Criseyde, the Canterbury Tales, and the Book of the Duchess reveals the ways in which Chaucer anticipates modern philosophical debates.