counting house poet

Chaucer’s poetic career in the years after 1372 shows how closely the movement of vernacular literary ideas tracked with the Italians’ international trading networks, and his work embodies that trade in ideas, frequently using accountancy—a young, exciting discipline—as a metaphor for moral reckoning. Noting how important those ideas were to Chaucer, his biographer Marion Turner goes so far as to call him, ‘the poet of the counting house’.

—Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Biblioasis, 2024)