Julia Arbutus is currently working with Dr. Kathryn McKinley to examine medieval money-lenders and merchants within Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and several tales from Boccaccio’s Decameron. She is looking particularly at the tensions between Christian and Jewish money-lenders and how those tensions shaped the representations of the loans made within these medieval texts. Her research pulls from both medieval economics and literary theory to show the pervasive nature of commerce throughout all aspects of society.