Chaucer as a Teacher

Abstract

Chaucer as a Teacher Sigmund Eisner (bio) Any society must look after its young and train them to take a place in the accepted organization of the culture. Although schooling was not as widespread during the fourteenth century as it is today, some children and young adults were instructed in the seven liberal arts, consisting of the trivium, which was grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium, which was arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. When we move from the general to the specific, we see that Geoffrey Chaucer was qualified to be an instructor in at least six of the seven liberal arts—grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy—and that he put these qualifications into practice: Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe (a medieval astronomical instrument), written in or near the year 1391,1 addresses itself at its beginning to the poet's ten-year-old son, Lewis Chaucer. The medieval planetary astrolabe is a brass disk that hangs by a swivel from the user's thumb. Its purpose is to pinpoint the location of the celestial bodies at a particular time and thus reveal the time of day or night. It is designed like a modern circular slide rule with all moving parts pivoting from the center of the disk. On the front of the astrolabe (see back cover) is a fixed plate showing the visible sky for a given latitude. Over the plate pivots a rete, a network that shows the moving bodies in the sky and the signs of the zodiac. The stars and the zodiac move together and are all shown on the rete. Over the rete lies a label that pivots at the center and runs from rim to rim. The cross on the rim at the top of the disk and the letters running around the disk indicate the twenty-four hours of the day; the cross stands for noon, A for 1 p.m., B for 2 p.m., M for midnight, and so on. The back of the astrolabe (Figure 1) contains a pivoted rule with two fins, perforated by two holes, one small and the other large. The back serves as a protractor, for with the rule, which is somewhat like a gunsight, one can learn the altitude of either the sun or another visible star. The user of the astrolabe hangs it from his thumb and lets the sun shine through the smaller pair of holes on the label or observes a star through the larger pair of holes. Using the protractor on the rim of the back, one can determine a star's altitude. It is assumed that the user already knows either the date of the day or the number of the day within the signs of the zodiac. The user transfers this information to the front of the astrolabe and turns the rete until the heavenly body lies exactly on the altitude that he has learned; the lines of altitude on the front are the nonconcentric circles seen near the top of the plate. Then, turning the label on the front so that it crosses the point where he has placed the sun or a star, he follows the label to the rim and learns the time of day. Chaucer's Treatise is divided into three parts: an introduction, a description of the parts of an astrolabe, and the conclusions or experiments possible with the instrument. In the early part of the Treatise Chaucer addresses a child, not only in tone but in name, but later, when the experiments become complicated, the child disappears, and Chaucer gradually adapts his language to the adult level. This shift in language and subject matter militates against Philippe Aries' influential but largely discredited theory that the Middle Ages lacked awareness of what we today consider to be the special nature of the child and that in the fourteenth century children were both portrayed and treated as miniature adults (Ariès 128; for one refutation of this idea, see Hanawalt 5-6). Some time ago I suggested that the function of Little Lewis in A Treatise on the Astrolabe is to serve as an audience persona, an actual person who...

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