![]() ![]() ![]() We still have families and friends and coworkers. We still go to work, eat food, wear clothes, and some of us attend church. Most things in Chaucer’s everyday life still exist today. When it comes to daily life, historians are assisted by the fact that, in some respects, daily life has not changed very much. But historians keep trying to narrow the gap by finding more and more evidence and interpreting the evidence better and better over time. We can never know everything perfectly about the past, so there is always a little bit of fiction in every piece of history writing. Historians take as much evidence as they can find and try to construct a likely scenario with it. Sometimes, social historians take literature and art into account too. Social historians look for textual evidence in legal documents, such as wills and tax records, and for physical evidence, such as architecture and objects recovered during archaeological excavations. Writing about daily life in Chaucer’s era can be accomplished using techniques, that is, methodology, developed by social historians. ![]() Kennedy A reference chapter from The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (September 2017) Everyday Life in Late Medieval England Kathleen E. ![]()
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