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 — John Chaucer, a wine merchant who also served as a deputy to the king’s butler — and spent his life in royal and civic service. He first surfaces in the records in 1357, a youth placed in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster; he soldiered in France in the Hundred Years’ War and was captured near Reims in the winter of 1359–60, his ransom part-paid from the royal purse. There followed the working life of a trusted servant of the crown: diplomatic journeys, including missions to Genoa and Florence in 1372–73 that carried him into the orbit of Italian letters; appointment in 1374 as controller of the wool customs for the port of London; a Kent seat in the Parliament of 1386; and the clerkship of the king’s works from 1389, with charge of the upkeep of royal buildings. He wrote his poetry in the hours such offices left him. He died in 1400, by tradition on 25 October, and was buried in Westminster Abbey — the first poet laid in the corner of the south transept that later drew other poets’ graves around it and took the name Poets’ Corner.

Chaucer depicted as a pilgrim in the early-fifteenth-century Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales (Huntington Library, EL 26 C 9). — Ellesmere Chaucer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A layman’s learning

What sets Chaucer apart is the particular learning his poetry carries. The educated culture of the Middle Ages for which he wrote 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. The framework descended, through Arabic intermediaries, from Ptolemy of Alexandria, whose Almagest fixed the mathematics of the spheres and whose Tetrabiblos supplied the standing defense of astral influence; a fourteenth-century clerk inherited the heavens as a calculable and significant order, where each planet bore a temperament, a metal, a sphere, and a reach into human affairs. Chaucer knew the system in detail and used it with an exactness that is itself a kind of testimony.

His knowledge was not the magus’s. He was a learned reader, a man who owned and worked through Latin technical books and could turn their contents into English — a craftsman of vernacular knowledge rather than a seeker after the hidden sciences his characters chase. The same temperament shows in his prose translation, made around 1380, of the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, the Boece, drawn from the Latin with help from a French version and a Latin commentary. From Boethius he took the great late-antique vocabulary of Fortune, Fate, Providence, and the free will that turns beneath them — a vocabulary that runs through the Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, and that frames every question his astrology raises about whether the stars compel or merely incline.

A near-contemporary likeness of Chaucer in Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes (British Library, Harley MS 4866, f. 88r, c. 1411), drawn by one who had known him. — Thomas Hoccleve manuscript, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Treatise on the Astrolabe

Near the end of his life, around 1391, Chaucer composed the Treatise on the Astrolabe — a working manual, in plain English prose, explaining how to use the brass instrument to tell the hour, to take the altitude of a star or the sun, and to read off the changing positions of the heavens. He wrote it for a boy he addresses as Lyte Lowys, little Lewis, then ten years old; whether the child was his own son or the son of his friend Lewis Clifford has never been settled, and the affection of the address does not depend on the answer. The work was planned in five parts and broken off after the first two: the first describing the instrument and naming its plates, rete, and rule, the second teaching the operations performed with it.

The Treatise is among the earliest technical works of science in the English language — by common account the oldest English writing on an elaborate scientific instrument — and Chaucer was explicit about why he wrote it in English at all, telling the boy that he set the matter down in light rules and bare words in English because the child as yet knew only a little Latin. The matter itself was not his invention. The Treatise is a translation and reordering of two Latin authorities: the treatise on the making and use of the astrolabe that circulated under the name of Messahalla — the Latinized Māshāʾallāh, the Jewish astrologer of the early Abbasid court, whose Arabic learning reached the West through Latin — and the De sphaera of the thirteenth-century English schoolman Sacrobosco. The Messahalla thread ties Chaucer’s plain English manual to the long current of the Arabic Hermetica and the wider Arabic-into-Latin transmission by which Greek and Persian astral science had been carried into medieval Europe. What Chaucer did was not to advance the science but to make its working core speak English to a child — an act of translation that is itself an event in the history of knowledge in the vernacular.

Astrology in the poetry

Chaucer’s narrative verse 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. The Wife of Bath explains her own appetites by her nativity — herself all of Venus in feeling, her heart of Mars, born with the sign of the Bull rising and Mars within it — and she garnishes her speech by quoting a proverb she fathers on Ptolemy’s Almagest, a book she has plainly never opened, so that the citation tells more about her than about the stars. The short poem the Complaint of Mars sets a lover’s lament inside a precise planetary event, the conjunction and parting of Mars and Venus, read by scholars against the sky of the 1380s. In the Knight’s Tale the warring prayers of the lovers are arbitrated among the planetary gods, Mars and Venus and Saturn, whose temperaments decide the plot. How far Chaucer himself credited astrological influence, as against deploying its vocabulary for the human truth it carried, is a question his irony keeps open: he can give a character a horoscope as fixed as iron and then let her undo herself by her own will, leaving the relation of star and choice exactly where Boethius had left the relation of Providence and freedom.

A brass planispheric astrolabe of the type Chaucer’s treatise describes, its openwork rete carrying star-pointers above the climate plate (Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge). — Andrew Dunn, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale

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. A canon and his servant come spurring after the pilgrims on the Canterbury road; the master slips away in shame, and the breathless yeoman stays to tell what seven years at the furnace have cost him. The tale runs through the apparatus — the cucurbites and alembics, the waters and salts and the four spirits and seven bodies, the sublimations and calcinations and the long watch over the fire — and through the failures, the crucible that cracks and scatters the work across the floor, the money and years that vanish into smoke. Its second part turns to outright fraud: a sleight worked on a covetous priest, in which the trickster-canon palms silver into the apparatus and seems to make it from base matter, one of his deceptions turning on the plain physical fact that quicksilver flees in heat.

The Canon’s Yeoman, the furnace-worn servant who narrates Chaucer’s portrait of alchemy from inside the workshop, in the Ellesmere manuscript. — Ellesmere Chaucer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The technical detail is precise enough that readers from the seventeenth century onward have taken the tale as evidence of how the art was actually practiced; Elias Ashmole, gathering the English alchemical verse a quarter millennium later, cited Chaucer as a master of the science. The terms are correct, the sequence of operations is credible, and the named authorities — Arnaldus of Villanova within the tale, and behind it the encyclopedic Speculum Naturale of Vincent of Beauvais — are the right ones for a fourteenth-century reader. Whether that knowledge came from the laboratory or the library has never been determined, and the tale itself does not say. What it says, plainly, is that the seekers of gold are ruined by the seeking: their faces discolored by the fire, their substance gone, their hope renewed after every failure by the very art that beggars them. Whether Chaucer condemns alchemy as such, or only its charlatans, is left, characteristically, unresolved — the yeoman ends half-cursing the craft and half-confessing he cannot leave off loving it.

Scholarship and texts

The standard modern life is Derek Pearsall’s The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1992), a critical biography that sifts the documentary record from the long accretion of legend. Chaucer’s astronomy and astrology have their own dedicated study in J. D. North’s Chaucer’s Universe (1988), which works through the poet’s planetary references with technical seriousness, dating the skies of the poems and reconstructing the instrument behind the Treatise. The Treatise on the Astrolabe and its debt to the Messahalla and Sacrobosco traditions are surveyed in the standard reference summary, and the alchemical accuracy of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, with its sources in Arnaldus of Villanova and Vincent of Beauvais, is the subject of a long line of source-study; Chaucer’s translation of Boethius, the Boece, is the philosophical keel beneath the poetry’s treatment of fate.

These works sit downstream of the textual traditions Chaucer drew on. The Arabic-Latin astral corpus that supplied the Astrolabe its Messahalla material runs forward into the printed editions of the Renaissance; the canon of Latin alchemy whose furnace-language the Canon’s Yeoman reproduces was later fixed in the great printing-house compendia, the Theatrum Chemicum and Manget’s Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa, where the same operations Chaucer’s yeoman names appear in their full Latin dress. Chaucer stands a century and more before those collections, a fourteenth-century witness reporting in the vernacular what the learned sciences of the stars and the metals looked like before they were gathered into folios.

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.

Chaucer’s tomb in the south transept of Westminster Abbey, the nucleus of what became Poets’ Corner, in an 1894 engraving. — Herbert Railton, A Brief Account of Westminster Abbey (1894), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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