Entitled, Chaucer’s London Reading Circles, this year’s Chaucer Lecture takes place on Thursday 7th April at 6pm in Grimond Lecture Theatre 1 and will be given by Professor Caroline Barron.
In the lecture, Professor Barron will explore the London milieu in which Chaucer’s works circulated in the generation after his death. It has been assumed that those who read (or heard) Chaucer’s works were members of the Court and educated civil servants. This may well have been the case during his own life time, but a close look at various records surviving from the City of London in the early fifteenth century has suggested that his readers moved down the social scale and that Chaucer’s works were circulating, not only among merchants, but also among artisans and those who might be termed the’ urban middle classes’.
Caroline Barron is Professor Emerita in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London.
All are welcome to the lecture and to the wine reception which follows.