Chaucer’s England

by Diana Childress

Kansas State Reading Circle 2001-2002 Recommended Reading List

"Really a very fine book, constantly interesting and informative, and always very readable.... An inquisitive teenager would just keep reading." —Traugott Lawler, Professor of English, Yale University

Drawing on historical and archaeological sources, and from Chaucer’s own life, this book recreates England in the age of Chaucer for students and teachers of The Canterbury Tales. It puts readers directly into the tumultuous fourteenth century, to see how English society was organized; how it was changing; its religious, political, and economic tensions, including controversies of church and state; warfare; and the plague.

To give a sense of the mindset of Chaucer’s characters and original audience, Diana Childress explains science, medicine, and education—what people learned in school, how they treated illness, what they saw when they looked up at the night sky. She provides the daily details: what people ate and wore, where they lived, what they did for fun, what kinds of work they did, how they were paid for it, the laws and mores they abided by. Childress quotes liberally from The Canterbury Tales to show this history at work in the living tales.

About the Author

Diana Childress holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pittsburgh. She has taught at the university level, written for textbook publishers and children’s magazines, and been a children’s librarian.

For similar titles about other periods of British literary history, see

• Understanding Shakespeare’s England and
• Victorian Life, Victorian Fiction by Jo McMurtry