Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and FranceFor a long time scholars have generally shared the belief that late medieval authors particularly in England and especially Chaucer wrote for private readers. This book challenges that view and current orthodoxies in orality literacy theory. It assembles and analyses in depth, for the first time, an overwhelming mass of evidence that in both Britain and France from the mid fourteenth to the late fifteenth century, literate, elite audiences continued