Measuring the Immeasurable: Farting, Geometry, and Theology in the Summoner’s Tale

This study triangulates the three features of the final scene in the Summoner’s Tale identified in my title. The relationship between two of these, farting and theology, is clear enough, since the final episode involves a parody of Pentecost. The scatological substitution of Thomas’s fart for the mighty wind accompanying the descent of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2 has religious significance as a satiric image of friars’ false claims to apostolic stature.¹ Also prominent in this scene is language loaded with academic, particularly logical/mathematical, meaning. The challenge to divide the fart equally is seen by the lord of the village as a “probleme” arising out of the “ymaginacioun” (III 2218–19) of the churl Thomas. Initially appearing so strange as to be a “question” heretofore unknown in “ars-metrike” (III 2222–23) and so difficult as to be “an inpossible” (III 2231), the problem requires “demonstracion” (III 2224) of a solution. Jankin then formulates his cartwheel proposal, claiming that it provides “preeve which that is demonstratif” (III 2272) that a fart can be “evene deled” (III 2249), and the people present judge him to have addressed the issue as “wel as Euclide [dide] or Ptholomee” (III 2289).² The Pentecostal parody does not require this academic register. I want to add to thinking about that register by focusing on the geometric aspects of the episode, apparent enough in Jankin’s circular solution, in the repeated insistence that the fart must be “departed equally” (III 2237; see also III 2225, 2249, 2273), and most obviously in the comparisons to Euclid and Ptolemy. My argument is, first, that a particular intellectual development in fourteenth-century England contributed to Chaucer’s staging of the Pentecostal parody within the framework of an academic parody, and, second, that this framework has effects beyond antifraternal satire, one of which is to invite reflection on efforts to measure or quantify abstract theological concerns.

The intellectual development behind this episode is what John Murdoch calls “the near frenzy to measure everything imaginable.” Murdoch and others have explored this concern among a group of logicians and philosophers at Oxford in the 1320s to 1340s known as the “Merton school” or the “Oxford calculators,” the most important of whom is Thomas Bradwardine. The calculators and the people they influenced applied various “measure languages” (analytical terminology used to discuss such subjects as proportion, infinity and continuity, and local motion) not only to problems in logic and natural science, but also to philosophical and theological questions. For example, the mathematical distinction between the infinite and the finite was applied to the theological issue of distinguishing the love due God from that due one’s fellow creatures, and as a means of demonstrating how there could be variation within species and yet incommensurability between species. The language of intension and remission of forms (acceleration/deceleration, or increase/decrease in qualities such as heat) was used to analyze questions of the movement of the will.³

Euclid was important to anyone thinking along such lines. The clarity and explicitness of the Elements in its structure and its proofs made it the quintessential model for mathematical/scientific thinking and the presentation of demonstrative arguments. Book I begins with first principles (definitions, postulates, and common notions or axioms) and then works out propositions (problems and theorems) based on logical reasoning from those principles. Subsequent books introduce new definitions before presenting further propositions. The most popular medieval Latin versions of the Elements gave its methodological procedures even greater prominence.⁴ Ptolemy’s Almagest, the central text for medieval mathematical astronomy, confirmed Euclid’s status, presenting itself as an applied version of the Elements, with extended geometric proofs used to demonstrate and rationalize astronomical motion. In his preface Ptolemy divides theoretical philosophy into theology, mathematics, and physics. He claims that the first and third are more “guesswork” than science—theology because of its “ungraspable nature,” physics because sublunar matter is unstable. Mathematics is the only way to “sure and unshakeable knowledge” because “its kind of proof proceeds by indisputable methods, namely arithmetic and geometry.” Thus, in...