The Authorship of The Equatorie of the Planetis by Kari Anne Rand Schmidt (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER readers will find no useful answers--definitive or otherwise-in this con­ ceptually flawed book. SUSANNA GREER FEIN KentState University KARI ANNE RAND ScHMIDT. The Authorship of The Equatorie of the Planetis. ChaucerStudies, vol. 19. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993. Pp. xii, 436. $71.00. Because any book of this title is bound to raise expectations among Chaucerians of a definitive answer to the question, "Did he or didn't he?," it is probably fairest to dash those hopes at the outset of this review. &hmidt concludes that "so far the case for Chaucer's authorship of the Equatorie ofthe Planetis rests on insufficient evidence. Unless new and deci­ sive proof comes to light, the verdict must remain one of 'not proven'" (p. 99). For this and other reasons, the book is likely to be ofmore immedi­ ate interest to students of language and of Middle English scientific prose than to those whose primary interest is Chaucer. The book is in four parts. The first part reviews evidence of the Equa­ torie's handwriting, dialect, and style and reassesses earlier arguments for and against Chaucer's authorship. The second aims to shed new light on the question by making statistical comparisons of the language of the Equatorie with, on the one hand, that of prose known to be Chaucer's, and, on the other, with that ofroughly contemporary astronomical prose almost certainly not written by Chaucer. Together these two parts make up slightly less than one-fourth of the book. The remainder consists of descriptions and transcriptions ofthe Equatorie manuscript and some ofthe texts with which &hmidt compares it (part 3), a key word in context (KWIC) concordance to the text of the Equatorie (part 4), an appendix containing details of the statistical data summarized in part 2, and a bibli­ ography, an index of manuscripts, and a general index. Part 1 begins with an exhaustive review of the authorship debate and then devotes one chapter to each of the questions which have played the largest role in that debate: "A Holograph in Chaucer's Hand?," "Is the Equatorie in Chaucer's Dialect and Idiolect?" and "Chaucer'sSyntax?" After reviewing and extending earlier arguments that the Equatorie is an author's holograph, &hmidt goes on to compare the writing of"Hand C" in manu254 REVIEWS script Peterhouse 75.1, the one which D. J. Price proposed as Chaucer's, with that in several Public Records Office (PRO) documents which have been proposed, at various times and with varying degrees of conviction, as possible Chaucer holographs; the book includes facsimiles of all of these. Schmidt devotes considerable space to PRO E 207/6/2 (56), the Wool Quay memorandum which has received most attention, and after a careful review of previous discussions and the writing itself concludes that "the scripts give no reason for thinking these documents to be by the same hand" (p. 39}-a dismissal which is surprisingly sweeping, even after her careful delineation of the differences in writing between the Equatorie and the PRO document. Schmidt goes on to expose several flaws in M. L. Samuels's argument that the spelling of the Equatorie is Chaucer's own and states that Samuels has shown that "the Equatorie is in Chaucer's dialect, but not that it is in Chaucer's idiolect" (p. 46). Finally, she demonstrates that previous attempts to solve the authorship question on the basis of syntactic features were flawed in their assumption that one can identify '"typically Chaucerian' scientific prose with which to compare the Equa­ torie" (p. 54); measured by the syntactic features analyzed to date, Chaucer's prose style varies widely even within single works such as the Astrolabe. In part 2, Schmidt offers several new statistically based approaches to the problem, comparing the Equatorie with the text of the Astrolabe in Cam­ bridge University Library manuscript Dd.3.53, the Melibee, and The Par­ son's Tale, as well as with two Middle English treatises in Trinity College, Cambridge, manuscript 0.5.26, The Shippe o/Venyse and The Newe Theorik of Planetis. She finds in chapter 6, "Type/Token Ratios for Consecutive Units of Text," that the results...