Liza Picard, an chronicler of London society across the centuries, now weaves an infinity of small details into an arresting tapestry of life in 14th-century England. Her technique — pursued with the verve and spirit for which she is already justly admired — is to celebrate Chaucer’s pilgrim portraits by resituating them within an enlarged field of medieval practices and assumptions.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s own trick, in enlivening the portraits with which he launches his Canterbury Tales, is the epitomising detail, the apparently random observation — in current poker language, the ‘tell’ — that gives the pilgrim’s game away. He zooms in on the Knight’s rust-stained tunic, the Prioress’s pampered lapdogs, the Summoner’s skin disease, the Pardoner’s long and stringy hair. Picard has her own sharp eye for lively detail but goes in the other direction: less to selection than to amplification, attending to the wider field of assumption, observation, tradition and fact within which Chaucer’s choices resonate.
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