The Age of Saturn: Literature and History in The Canterbury Tales

A conspicuous feature of The Canterbury Tales is the way Chaucer anchors general features of social upheaval in the experience of individuals, using marriage, for example, as a microcosm for larger forms of ′governance′, whether social, political or religious. In The Age of Saturn Peter Brown and Andrew Butcher explore how Chaucer′s poetry is full of exploratory links between individual and social spheres, which are particularly apparent in the themes of astrology, religion, trade, political crisis and myth. The authors closely analyse six of the tales, and use them to shed light on the crises of the period, those fifty years or so following the Black Death: a period of uncertainty and anxiety they call the ′Age of Saturn′.