Social Chaucer

“Admirably detailed, lucid, original and always lively… By far the best history of Chaucer’s life and social relations I have ever read, a delightfully intelligent explication of the social meaning of Chaucer’s art, and the consistently sensitive deployment of a rich understanding of ideological conflicts and changes in late fourteenth-century England… Moving and compelling… A wonderful book.”—David Aers, The Times Higher Education Supplement

“[A] sensitive exploration of historical detail… The question of [Chaucer’s] audience is a complex one, and Strohm charts the known, the unknown, the plausible guess, and the fictional constructs well and suggestively.”—Helen Cooper, Review of English Studies

“One of the most important books on Middle English in many years.”—Lee Patterson, Speculum

“An ambitious book and one that stands at the very center of contemporary Chaucer criticism—and is central to the current demand for a new kind of historicism. It is extremely knowledgeable on the social and historical background and at the same time sensitive in an unusual way to the poetry; and it contains some of the best writing on Chaucer’s life I have read.”—Derek Pearsall, Harvard University