Ardis Butterfield 
Chaucer and the City 

Essays exploring Chaucer’s identity as a London poet and the urban context for his writings.


Literature of the city and the city in literature are topics of major contemporary interest. This volume enhances our understanding of Chaucer’s iconic role as a London poet, defining the modern sense of London as a city in history, steeped in its medieval past. Building on recent work by historians on medieval London, as well as modern urban theory, the essays address the centrality of the city in Chaucer’s work, and of Chaucer to a literature and a language of the city. Contributors explore the spatial extent of the city, imaginatively and geographically; the diverse and sometimes violent relationships between communities, and the use of language to identify and speak for communities; the worlds of commerce, the aristocracy, law, and public order. A final section considers the longer history and memory of the medieval city beyond the devastations of the Great Fire and into the Victorian period.


Dr ARDIS BUTTERFIELD is Reader in English at University College London.


Contributors: ARDIS BUTTERFIELD, MARION TURNER, RUTH EVANS, BARBARA NOLAN, CHRISTOPHER CANNON, DEREK PEARSALL, HELEN COOPER, C. DAVID BENSON, ELLIOTKENDALL, JOHN SCATTERGOOD, PAUL DAVIS, HELEN PHILLIPS

Table of Content

Introduction: Chaucer and the Detritus of the City – Ardis Butterfield

Greater London – Marion Turner

The Production of Space in Chaucer’s London – Ruth Evans

Chaucer’s Poetics of Dwelling in
Troilus and Criseyde – Barbara Nolan

Chaucer and the Language of London – Christopher Cannon

The
Canterbury Tales and London Club Culture – Derek Pearsall

London and Southwark Poetic Companies: `Si tost c’amis’ and the
Canterbury Tales – Helen Cooper

Literary Contests and London Records in the
Canterbury Tales – C. David Benson

The Great Household in the City: The Shipman’s Tale – Elliot Kendall

London and Money: Chaucer’s Complaint to His Purse – John Scattergood

After the Fire: Chaucer and Urban Poetics, 1666-1743 – Paul Davis

Chaucer and the Nineteenth-Century City – Helen Phillips

About the author

The late Derek Pearsall was Emeritus Gurney Professor of Middle English Literature at Harvard University; he wrote extensively on Chaucer, Gower, Langland and Lydgate, including biographies of Chaucer and Lydgate, an edition of the C-text of Langland’s Piers Plowman.