Social Chaucer
- Author / Editor
- Strohm, Paul.
Social Chaucer
- Published
- Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
- Physical Description
- xii, 236 pp.
- Description
- Using a variety of contemporary texts, including statutes, poll taxes, and political treatises as well as fictional narratives, Strohm studies the structure of late-medieval social relations to provide an interpretative context for events in Chaucer's life and for themes in all his poetry.
- He examines the most persistent and prestigious social model of hierarchy--with its insistence on a divinely sanctioned and eternal order of vertically arrayed estates--and the rapid fourteenth-century elaboration of an alternative social paradigm with social relations horizontally arrayed, communal, secular, and bound in finite time.
- Chaucer's poetry embraces the tension between these two models reflected in the transformation from feudalism to capitalism in the late Middle Ages.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism.
- Chaucer's Life.