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    Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England
    Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England
    Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England
    Audiobook12 hours

    Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

    Written by Liza Picard

    Narrated by Jennifer M. Dixon

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The Middle Ages re-created through the cast of pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales.

    Among the surviving records of fourteenth-century England, Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry is the most vivid. Chaucer wrote about everyday people outside the walls of the English court-men and women who spent days at the pedal of a loom, or maintaining the ledgers of an estate, or on the high seas. In Chaucer's People, Liza Picard transforms The Canterbury Tales into a masterful guide for a gloriously detailed tour of medieval England, from the mills and farms of a manor house to the lending houses and Inns of Court in London.

    In Chaucer's People we meet again the motley crew of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. Drawing on a range of historical records such as the Magna Carta, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Cookery in English, Picard puts Chaucer's characters into historical context and mines them for insights into what people ate, wore, read, and thought in the Middle Ages. What can the Miller, "big . . . of brawn and eke of bones" tell us about farming in fourteenth-century England? What do we learn of medieval diets and cooking methods from the Cook? With boundless curiosity and wit, Picard re-creates the religious, political, and financial institutions and customs that gave order to these lives.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateApr 23, 2019
    ISBN9781684418886
    Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

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    Reviews for Chaucer's People

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    • 4/5
      Have you ever wished someone would curate a Wikipedia hole on the subject of Medieval English society, just for you? You'd be in luck with Liza Picard's Chaucer's People.I really liked the book myself, but I loved the organization and semi-academic, friendly voice Picard used. She sorted the Canterbury Tale pilgrims into social groups based on their occupations/where they live, then used each pilgrim's description and social rank as a jumping off point for some element of English society. Picard tries to provide context for Chaucer's descriptions and doesn't keep strictly to what a person's title meant - a picture may be worth a thousand words, but only where the symbolism and contextual clues are already known. For example, the Wife of Bath, then, leads to discussions of weaving and other forms of cloth production and competition with the Flemish weavers, as well as social implications of her marriages and details about the major pilgrimages she would have undertaken. Each of these subjects is touched on in other chapters as they are relevant, and the same happens for each of the characters.The way each topic leads into other related topics, then shows up again elsewhere reminds me a lot of a Wikipedia dive. It's like following internal links and coming back around, but Picard has already organized the links into a somewhat logical structure and highlights the most relevant or interesting bits of information, particularly as it would relate to the Canterbury Tales - she includes Chaucer himself as a relevant detail wherever it makes sense. Of course, he put himself in the story and everthing in it is form his perspective.There are a few maps at the begining, of England and the opposite side of the channel, London, and common pilgrimages. At the back are a few chronologies of historical figures who were particularly relevant to the book, namely John of Gaunt, Chaucer's patron.Taken as a whole, I feel like this book has given me a better understanding of daily life in Medieval England than just about any other book I've read. Most others I've come across tend to focus on just one part of society or don't do as good a job at showing how all the different stratas function together. But of course, this has a narrow focus, too, of London and the nearby counties, and only a little bit abroad, and the glimpses we get of Elsewhere are filtered through what was known to the English. Still, I enjoyed it and feel like I gained a new depth of understanding from it.