Liza Picard "Chaucer's People" (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
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 organisation 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 organised 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 everything in it is from his perspective.
There are a few maps at the beginning, 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 strata 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.
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