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Description of  Following Chaucer: Offices of the Active Life

Following Chaucer: Offices of the Active Life explores three representative figuresthe royal woman, the poet, and the merchantin relation to the concept of office, which Cicero linked to the health of the republic, but Chaucer to that of the common good. Not usually conjoined to the term office, these three figures, situated in the active life, were not firmly mapped onto the body politic, which was used to figure a relational and ordered social body ruled by the king, the head. These figures are points of entry into a set of questions rooted in Chaucers understanding of his cultural and historical past and in his keen appraisal of the social dynamics of his own time that also reverberate in the centuries after Chaucers death. Read more