Chaucer lived in a society that was aware of childhood and adolescence as distinctive stages of human life and which inherited practices whereby young people were brought up and trained for adulthood. Informally, at home, children were introduced to social norms, religion and work. Those from wealthier families underwent more formal education, mastering literacy at home, in schools or in great households, where they learnt reading, rules of courtesy, French and, in the case of some boys, Latin. Chaucer’s works refer in passing to most of these processes, with particular attention to adolescents, including university scholars. During the fifteenth century his works in general came to be seen as having educational value. The Astrolabe, first written for his son Lewis, seems to have been used for teaching reading to other young children while his major writings were recommended as suitable literature for older ones.

Later medieval art is usually discussed in terms of categories like architecture, sculpture, manuscript illumination, stained glass etc. While these categories have historical roots, medieval viewers naturally tended to conflate rather than anatomise what they saw: Chaucer’s testimony to the Court of Chivalry suggests this. Academic taxonomies of art are nevertheless valuable to scholars, even if the terminology of style associated with them is largely modern. Our understanding of later medieval art is clouded by vast material losses, although documents such as the inventories of Pleshy Castle (1397) and the abbot’s chapel at Bury St Edmunds (1429) offer some compensation. These reveal that taste for types of object and imagery was not generally conditioned by social status (e.g. lay or clerical). At the level of the common person, parish churches were major sites of display. Again, documents like the archdeacons’ inventories for the diocese of Norwich (1368) help fill in the gaps created by loss. Sepulchral monuments and architecture enjoy higher rates of survival and thus give a more concrete idea of the look, purpose and function of art.