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Books and Booklessness in Chaucer’s England

Most of Chaucer’s contemporaries never owned a book. How do we reconcile this fact with the everyday bookishness of Chaucer’s writings? This chapter describes the intersection, in Chaucer’s time, of the traditional oral and written dissemination of ideas, and new book technologies such as paper and cursive scripts. It identifies Chaucer with an emerging class of secular household and urban clerks who made their living by reading and writing. Together with the medieval religious, these men formed a small but significant network in medieval England for the production and circulation of a large number of texts, in all kinds of book and non-book formats. The chapter covers Chaucer’s own dealings with books at key moments in Chaucer’s career, from the literacy he must have acquired as a child in a merchant-class household in London to the transmission of his literary works within his coterie, and then, via professional book producers, to a wider group of readers, including modern ones.