Geoffrey Chaucer

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Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, courtier, and civil servant of the later fourteenth century, best remembered for the unfinished Canterbury Tales and counted, since his own age, as the founder of a literature in English rather than French or Latin. He was born around 1343, the son of a London vintner, and spent his life in royal and civic service — soldier, diplomat, controller of customs, clerk of the king’s works — writing his poetry in the hours such offices left him. He died in 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the corner that later drew other poets’ graves around it.

What gives Chaucer a place in this collection is the particular learning his poetry carries. The educated culture he wrote for took astronomy and astrology as a single science: the heavens were read both as a clock and as a register of influence, and a writer was expected to know the difference between a planet’s motion and its supposed effect. Chaucer knew it well. Near the end of his life he composed the Treatise on the Astrolabe — a working manual, in plain English prose, explaining how to use the instrument to tell the hour and find the positions of the stars, written for a boy named Lewis. It is among the earliest technical works of science in the language. His narrative poetry is dense with the same material: characters cast under the signs that govern them, events timed to the wheeling of the planets, a whole human comedy played out beneath a sky understood as both mechanism and fate. How far Chaucer himself credited astrological influence, as against merely deploying its vocabulary, is a question his irony keeps open.

The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, one of the Canterbury stories, is something rarer still: a long, exact, disenchanted portrait of alchemy from inside the workshop. Its narrator is the breathless servant of an alchemist, and the tale runs through the furnaces, the waters and salts and sublimations, the crucibles that crack and the money that vanishes — and ends in fraud, a confidence trick worked on a gullible priest. The technical detail is precise enough that scholars have read the tale as evidence of how the art was actually practised; the moral is plainly that the seekers of gold are ruined by it. Whether Chaucer is condemning alchemy as such, or only its charlatans, is left, characteristically, unresolved.

He was not himself a magus or an adept, and nothing suggests he sought the hidden knowledge his characters chase. He was a learned layman who found in the period’s sciences of the stars and the metals a rich seam of human material — ambition, credulity, the longing to read fate or to make gold — and worked it with an observer’s coolness. The interest of his testimony lies exactly there: it records what these arts looked like to a sharp, unbelieving, contemporary eye.

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