Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

by Liza Picard Narrated by Jennifer M. Dixon

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Booklist

"This fast-paced, entertaining overview will appeal to students and fans of medieval history."

Spectator

"Liza Picard…weaves an infinity of small details into an arresting tapestry of life in 14th-century England. Her technique—pursued with the verve and spirit for which she is already justly admired—is to celebrate Chaucer’s pilgrim portraits by resituating them within an enlarged field of medieval practices and assumptions…[A]n enthusiast enacting her respect for Chaucer’s enduring and indelible accomplishment."

John Higgs

"Chaucer's People is a holiday in the complex, joyful, indelicate medieval world—an approachable, engaging and highly recommended account of an England which is long gone, but whose spirit lingers."

Times

"If you were to reread The Canterbury Tales, you’d get so much more from it with this at your side."

From the Publisher

Liza Picard, a chronicler of London society across the centuries, now weaves an infinity of small details into an arresting tapestry of life in 14th-century England. Her technique - pursued with the verve and spirit for which she is already justly admired - is to celebrate Chaucer's pilgrim portraits by resituating them within an enlarged field of medieval practices and assumptions ... Picard concludes with a speculative Chaucer continuation ... Most notably, she - a woman who has herself lived long and thought much - creates an inner monologue for the Wife of Bath, who, after visiting the shrine, drifts into a Molly Bloomian soliloquy, reflecting on the pros, cons, and possible personal advantages of taking the veil. As in the rest of the book, we here encounter not presumption but homage, an enthusiast enacting her respect for Chaucer's enduring and indelible accomplishment—Paul Strohm, The Spectator

Chaucer's pilgrims are the first historical characters who feel like real people, and now Liza Picard makes their world as vivid and three-dimensional as the merry band themselves. Chaucer's People is a holiday in the complex, joyful, indelicate medieval world - an approachable, engaging and highly recommended account of an England which is long gone, but whose spirit lingers—John Higgs, author of Watling Street

As you read this book, Chaucer's writing gains a depth and pungency it usually lacks ... Sometimes these snippets, in their oddness, distance the toiling pilgrims from us. At others, they bring them much closer ... There is a Chaucerian pleasure in plain sentences, plainly written. This is more almanac than argument, but no less enjoyable for that. If you were to reread The Canterbury Tales, you'd get so much more from it with this at your side ... And there are some excellent titbits—Catherine Nixey, The Times

An absorbing and revealing companion volume to The Canterbury Tales—The Oldie

Wonderfully readable and full of delights ... It buoyed me up with its brilliant insights, many of them entirely new to me—John Simpson, BBC World Affairs Editor

Engaging and fun ... The premise of this entertaining book is to provide historical context for the multitude of figures in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It is well researched and packed with intriguing nuggets - from the etymology of the word "haberdasher" (from an old Icelandic word meaning a pedlar's sack), to the story of Richard Steris, "one of the cunningest players at the tenys in England", and a wonderful selection of medieval recipes ... Picard provides a wealth of detail both about the occupations of the various characters, and the wider contexts in which they operated. The section on the overwhelmingly complex nature of medieval law is particularly clear and effective—Hannah Skoda, BBC History Magazine

Chaucer's fourteenth-century story collection The Canterbury Tales is a classic hook on which to hang an exploration of the Middle Ages, and this take pleasingly spirals outwards to cover the characters (the nun, the knight, the miller) and the lives they would have led—History Revealed

Instructive fun ... The writing is always lively, and there are excellent colour illustrations—Dr G. R. Evans, Church Times

Brings to life the social history of a period we still know little about. A jolly good read for historians—This England

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171476625
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	04/23/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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