ABSTRACT
Strohm’s book sees Chaucer’s work and Chaucer himself as ‘deeply implicated’ in the ‘urgent social contests of the time’. By virtue of his connections both with the Court and with the increasingly powerful mercantile class, Chaucer was exposed with a peculiar intensity to what Strohm describes as the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the fourteenth century, and his work attempts to give a voice to different and competing social outlooks (from traditional hierarchical models based on domination to a new ethic of communal interaction). Strohm sees the Canterbury Tales as the climax of Chaucer’s social thinking, reading the work as a ‘project of representation’ of the various social groupings and as a ‘conciliation’ between them, ‘in the environment of lessened risk provided by a literary work’. For further discussion of this reading of the Tales, see my Introduction, pp. 15–17.
