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  • The Astronomer Ptolemy and the Morality of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral laws within.

(Kant, Critique of Practical Reason)

At the very end of the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer steps out of his role as pilgrim and into his role as a poet. 1 Taking leave of his poem, he quotes from St. Paul a pronouncement on the function and purpose of writing: “Al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine.” Because Chaucer’s own “entente” is formed on this didactic principle, he revokes all the worldly vanities he has written, including “the tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sownen into synne.” 2 Which parts of the Canterbury Tales do tend or conduce to sin? The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale manifestly challenge certain ideas of what is right. Do they also encourage or endorse what is wrong? The purpose of the present essay is to place the Wife’s discourse in what I believe to be a relevant moral context, and to do so by examining two moral maxims that she quotes and attributes to the second-century astronomer Claudius Ptolemy.

The quoted maxims are “If one is not corrected by others, others will be corrected by him,” and “Among all men, he is highest who does not care whose hand the world is in.” 3 The Wife quotes the former of these in response to the Pardoner’s interruption of her ever-lengthening Prologue. In quoting it she is asserting the authority of her own practical experience by citing the authority of a mathematical theorist: she is “expert,” she says, and her lessons ought to be heeded because

“‘Whoso that nyl be war by othere men, By hym shul othere men corrected be.’ [End Page 289] The same wordes writeth Ptholomee; Rede in his Almageste, and take it there.”

(D 180–83)

The Pardoner responds:

“Telle forth youre tale, spareth for no man, And teche us yonge men of youre praktike.”

(186–87)

“Praktike,” like its Greek and Latin equivalents praktikos and practica, is an adjective used as a substantive to name a kind of wisdom that requires experience. It is contrasted with “theorike” (theoretikos, theorica), meaning “theoretical science,” which one can learn by being instructed, without practical experience. 4 Why is it, asks Aristotle, that we can make a boy a mathematician but we can’t make him wise? 5 The answer is that mathematics (including mathematical astronomy) is a theoretical, teachable science, whereas the wisdom (phronesis) that comes from practical science is something for which boys (or “yonge men”) lack the requisite experience. The Pardoner’s reference to “praktike” invokes a framework to which the maxims quoted by the Wife of Bath should be referred for their significance. It is a schematic system for classifying knowledge that begins with an immediate division into two great species: practica, the kind the Wife claims for herself, and theorica, the kind on which Ptolemy’s authority rests.

The system of classification to which I refer is what modern scholars usually call the “Aristotelian” or “Aristotelian-Boethian” division of sciences. 6 Once all knowledge has been divided into the theoretical (or “speculative” or “contemplative”) and the practical (or “operative” or “active”), the theoretical is then sub-divided into physics, mathematics, and theology; and the practical is sub-divided, according to human groupings, into the moral sciences of ethics (individuals), economics (domestic units), and politics (the state). The principal transmitter of this system to the Latin West was Boethius, in whose Consolation of Philosophy, Book I, prose 1, Lady Philosophy appears bearing on her gown the Greek letters P, for “practical,” and TH, for “theoretical.” In his first commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge Boethius elaborates, giving the sub-divisions of each of the principal divisions and explaining that the first sub-division of practica concerns “virtue.” 7 In a commentary on the Consolation that Chaucer is known to have consulted, William of Conches arranges the sciences in order. 8 The first of the practical sciences is “ethics,” which concerns “morals.” Beginning there, William says, one ascends through the practical to the theoretical sciences so that, passing [End Page 290] through physics, mathematics, and mathematical astronomy, one moves up to contemplation of incorporeal things and, through theology, up to the Creator.

Two other early transmitters of the system were Cassiodorus (6 c.) and Isidore of Seville (early 7 c.). Cassiodorus says that the first of the practical sciences is called “morals” and that it produces a desire for a morally decent way of living and establishes a tendency to virtue. 9 Isidore likewise designates the practical as “moral.” 10 Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isidore were the principal sources for all subsequent discussion of the division and systematization of knowledge, 11 and the subject became important enough so that whole treatises came to be written on it.

The most influential of them using only Latin sources, Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon (early 12 c.), brings together the legacies of Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isidore, along with those of St. Augustine and John Cassian. 12 Hugh too presents practical sciences as beginning with “ethics, which is the science of morals.” 13 Dominicus Gundissalinus (later 12 c.) combines Hugh’s system with an array of pronouncements on the subject taken from Greek and Arabic authors. His work established a standard usage of the terms and concepts: whereas the theoretical leads to “knowledge of truth,” the practical leads to “love of good.” 14 The usefulness of practica, says Gundissalinus, is in knowing how to act in this life so as to hope for eternal life in the future, and the ethical part of practica is the science of ordering one’s acts in accord with decency of soul for an uncorrupt and morally beneficial life. This usage soon became established at every European center of learning. 15

Student guides written in the thirteenth century as introductions to philosophy show how the usage was assimilated. According to a formulation repeated in many of the guides, the intellect, darkened by its ties to the body, is informed by a habit of knowledge through theoretical science and by a habit of virtue through practical science. 16 As one of the guides puts it, the soul is disposed to receive the theoretical by its desire to be perfected by knowledge and to receive the practical by its desire to be perfected by virtue. 17 Practica, says the same guide, teaches one to act with virtue and to flee vice. 18 These student guides, produced in the Arts faculty at Paris and disseminated elsewhere, suggest that the conceptual framework had become commonplace in the academic world and that its terms had become, as Francis Bacon later called them, “familiar and scholastical terms.” 19

Having become scholastic commonplaces, they moved beyond the schools to become more widely familiar by way of vernacular literature. Brunetto Latini (13 c.) writes of “things one ought to do and ought not to do, according to practica” and explains that ethics teaches us first to govern ourselves and lead an honest life and to do good works and avoid [End Page 291] the wicked. 20 (It was for Brunetto’s moral teaching, incidentally, that Dante expressed gratitude.) 21 Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower writes,

It is Practique, whos office The vertu tryeth fro the vice, And techeth upon goode thewes To fle the compaignie of schrewes, Which stant in disposicion Of mannes free eleccion. 22

Christine de Pizan, writing very soon after Chaucer’s death, says that “practique” is the science “which tells us what we ought to do and what is not permitted.” 23 She goes on to say that the first part of “practique” is

Ethics, which withdraws us From vice and teaches and shows us how To govern ourselves: first To live rightly and honorably And also to do virtuous works. 24

The foregoing has been a hasty tour of some important sites in the locating of “praktike” within a system of classifying knowledge. It omits many authors and simplifies a good deal, but perhaps it will not have been too misleading, especially if we now supplement it and summarize the system by means of a standard schematic diagram, here adapted from the commentary on Boethius’ Consolation by William of Conches: 25

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The terms I have italicized mark our interest in relating the Wife of Bath’s practica (morality, especially individual morality) to Ptolemy’s theorica (especially his mathematical astronomy).

To bring the discussion back a little closer to Chaucer and the Wife of Bath, let us consider the following lines from the Roman de la Rose, wherein the speaker is La Vieille, the aging female character on whom the Wife is partly modeled:

I did not go to a school of love Where one learns the theorique of it. Rather I know all by practique: Experience, which I have had all my life, Has made me wise in love. 26

These lines lie behind the opening words of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue: 27

Experience, though noon auctoritee Were in this world, is right ynogh for me To speke of wo that is in mariage.

(D 1–3)

The Pardoner is quite right to see that the knowledge to which the Wife lays claim belongs under the heading of “praktike.”

How, then, does the Wife’s practical knowledge relate to Ptolemaic theoretical knowledge? Although the Wife attributes the maxims which she quotes to Ptolemy’s Almagest, their real source is not the Almagest itself but rather a prologue or set of prefatory materials that appear in the Arabic version of the Almagest which Gerard of Cremona translated into Latin in 1175. 28 The Almagest, from the time of its composition, had been recognized as an exceedingly important work, and once it had been translated into Latin, Western Europe could not ignore it. But it is also a very difficult and demanding work which, being theoretical, appeals only to a certain sort of mind. 29 The maxims prefaced to it, however, are more accessible and have a more general, more practical appeal. Gerard’s translation was by far the most widely used Western version of the Almagest, and the prefatory maxims it included were usable in ways that Ptolemy’s equations and columns of numbers were not. We find the maxims quoted not only in Latin writings directed to an academic audience but also in vernacular literature written for courtly and other audiences. Not only, for example, do they occur in Roger Bacon’s Opus Maius, in an anonymous commentary on a university textbook, and in Walter Burley’s Vita et Moribus Philosophorum. 30 They also occur in the Roman de la Rose, in Pèlerin de Prusse’s courtly astrological Livret de Eleccions, John Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme, Christine de Pizan’s biography of Charles V of France, and in Chaucer’s own Manciple’s Tale, as well as in his Wife of Bath’s [End Page 293] Prologue. 31 They are and were understood to be moral sentences, belonging to the category of practica; and they were thought to have been produced by one of the greatest authorities in theorica. Burley calls them “memorable moral proverbs” and says they were written by the “most illustrious geometer and astronomer” Ptolemy, who “accomplished more in astronomy than all his predecessors.” 32

Ptolemy himself provides a clue as to how mathematical astronomy might lead to moral wisdom. Almagest I.1, a philosophical introduction to the whole work, locates that work within the Aristotelian classification of sciences. It says first that those who do philosophy correctly have rightly divided wisdom into two parts, the theoretical and the practical, and then that Aristotle quite properly divided the theoretical into the physical, the mathematical, and the theological. 33 The framework is thus explicitly Aristotelian, but Ptolemy understands it in a rather Platonic way, with perhaps some ethical ideas from the Stoics and others being at work in his thinking as well. 34 The objects of his science are the lines, circles, and angles marked by sempiternal celestial bodies. In his introduction he presents these as real, mind-independent entities that are knowable with great certitude and exactness. And he believes that this science alone is uniquely helpful to all the other sciences. After saying how it helps the other theoretical sciences, physics and theology, he turns to practica, the science of most interest in the present essay, and says that mathematical astronomy is helpful, indeed is needed, in the pursuit of morally praiseworthy uprightness, because its study leads to an appreciation of celestial beauties and of ordered and unvarying goodness which is like the divine. Thus Ptolemy’s introduction, like the prefatory maxims that precede it in Gerard’s translation, could be of interest to thinkers with broad interests, even if those interests were not especially mathematical. 35 It is quoted and cited by a number of medieval writers, including some of the most impressive thinkers of the time: Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Campanus of Novara, and Roger Bacon. 36

Still, it remains to be shown in some detail how a mathematicized view of the cosmos can contribute to ethical wisdom. Fortunately for us, the second “Ptolemaic” maxim the Wife of Bath quotes is also quoted by Roger Bacon and Christine de Pizan, and in their treatments of it the help that mathematics gives to ethics is clearly exemplified. Bacon reasons that “practica, strictly taken, refers to morally significant actions by which we are good or evil” 37 and that since it is the science that applies to salvation “it is nobler than all the other sciences,” which therefore serve it: “Since . . . moral philosophy is the final goal of all branches of philosophy, the other sciences supply principles to it, according to the relation of preceding sciences to those that follow.” 38 Hence it is possible [End Page 294] for Bacon to argue as follows concerning Ptolemy’s theoretical purchase on practical wisdom:

Ptolemy . . . in the maxims in his Almagest says, “He is superior among men who does not care whose hand the world is in.” Nor is it to be wondered at that this is spoken by a philosopher who devoted most of his labor to knowing celestial bodies and the principal parts of the world. For he proves in the first book of the Almagest [that is, Almagest I.6] that the whole earth has no sensible quantity in comparison with the heavens. 39

Thus Bacon ties Ptolemy’s mathematics to the morally evaluative tradition of the “little earth,” which Chaucer was later to exploit in the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, and Troilus and Criseyde. 40 In that tradition, moral reflections on the idea of earth as a mathematical point (a dimensionless entity) persuade one not to care in whose hand so negligible a thing might be. 41 A. O. Lovejoy marks a terminus of the tradition (which he sketches from Ptolemy through Moses Maimonides and Roger Bacon) by quoting from Du Bartas:

Yea, though a king by wile or war had won All the round earth to his subjection, So, here the guerdon of his glorious pains: A needle’s point, a mote, a mite, he gains, A nit, a nothing (did he all possess). 42

In the world of sense-objects, a mathematical point is, finally, “a nothing.”

Christine de Pizan’s way of establishing the principle that moral truths can be achieved by mathematical aid is simply to quote (in French) the passage from Almagest I.1 to which I have referred above and which I now quote:

In the actions of life and in honorable conduct the need for this science [i.e. mathematical astronomy] is not small. For anyone who studies it with perseverance is drawn to love celestial beauties. Also, perseverance in that worthy study and continuation in it lead the student to that which resembles the soul, which is perfection of form, and make him resemble his creator. 43

Having thus quoted Ptolemy, Christine is in a position to use a maxim attributed to him as a remedy against “submission to low delights” and “worldly caprice.” She says that it is because of the destructiveness of such folly that Ptolemy says, “Happy is he who does not care whose hand the world is in.” 44 [End Page 295]

We now come to the Wife of Bath’s use of the same maxim:

Of alle men yblessed moot he be, The wise astrologien, Daun Ptholome, That seith this proverbe in his Almageste: “Of alle men his wysdom is the hyeste That rekketh nevere who hath the world in honde.”

(D 323–27)

Though it is the same maxim, her application of it could not be more different from Bacon’s and Christine’s. She says she has explained to her husband,

By this proverbe thou shalt understonde, Have thou ynogh, what thar thee recche or care How myrily that othere folkes fare? For, certeyn, olde dotard, by youre leve, Ye shul have queynte right ynogh at eve.

(328–32)

The injunction not to care whose hand the world is in has become an injunction not to inquire into a wife’s extramarital “disport” (319). The force of the moral sentence the Wife quotes is lost on her because of her free submission to “low delights.” She says, “I ne loved nevere by no discrecioun / But evere folwede myn appetit” (622–23). Persons who act thus are excluded from moral wisdom, as Thomas Aquinas explains: “It would be useless for followers of passion to hear moral science because they do not intend to act consequentially.” 45

And yet the Wife of Bath seems untroubled by any feeling that she might be a moral degenerate. Her great regret, which is “that evere love was synne” (614), is not penitent emotion. Nor, I think, do readers generally feel any great moral revulsion; and that fact presents a moral problem. 46 The aspirations and efforts of Ptolemy and the others to achieve some vision of real excellence, some knowledge of the right and the good that is beyond our invention, strike me as noble. The maxims the Wife quotes had been offered as specimen fruits of such efforts, as Roger Bacon and Christine de Pizan clearly saw. Re-contextualizing them in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue reduces them to trivial bits of decidedly sluttish ethical “wisdom.” Yet the Wife remains an appealing and attractive character. Even a Leavisite moralist can sympathize with her “rich humanity.” 47 Even a reader who recognizes in her the satirists’ perceptions of womanly “lechery, avarice, willfulness, and pragmatism,” can see these as “woven into a complex of human character” which becomes a “gallant symbol of humanity.” 48 It has been argued that the Wife’s vernacular renditions [End Page 296] of authoritative texts should be regarded as giving a just critique of “monolithic authority” and as “validating a previously disempowered audience.” 49 This can be so only if we are somehow persuaded that what the Wife does with her texts is on the whole a good thing. I am not so persuaded, but some very good readers apparently are. Lee Patterson, for example, thinks that the Wife “brilliantly rearranges and deforms her authorities to enable her to disclose new areas of experience.” 50 These sympathetic responses register defensible readings of the poem and are perhaps even natural effects of the poetry. The moral problem, in my judgment and maybe in Chaucer’s as well, is that poems eliciting such responses tacitly celebrate “worldly vanitees” and thereby “sownen into synne.”

Edgar Laird
Southwest Texas State University

Footnotes

1. X (I) 1081–92, the so-called “Retraction.” Here and throughout I refer to the Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, et al. (Boston, 1987).

2. Hugh of St. Victor in the 12 c. and Hugh Latimer in the 16 c. insist that St. Paul (Romans 14:4) is talking about what is written in Holy Scripture, but Chaucer’s “all” seems to include non-Scriptural writing as well. See A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (Philadelphia, 1984), 205–08. On Chaucer’s “entente” and his “ethical realism,” see Robert Myles, Chaucerian Realism (Woodbridge, Engl., 1994), 22–32, 80.

3. The maxims, quoted by the Wife at lines 180–81 and 326–27, are “Qui per alios non corrigitur, alii per ipsum corrigentur” and “Inter homines alcior existit qui non curat in cuius manu sit mundus.” See Karl Young, “Chaucer’s Aphorisms from Ptolemy,” SP 34 (1937): 1–7. Here and throughout the translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

4. See Olaf Pedersen, “Theorica: A Study in Language and Civilization,” Classica et Mediaevalia 22 (1961): 151–66. Praktik and theorike are contrasted in the prologue to Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe (lines 70 and 88). Wyclif, as quoted in the MED under “practik,” contrasts the theoretic or “speculatif,” which concerns “geometrie and other sciences,” with “practik,” which concerns “how men shulde lyve by Goddis lawe.”

5. Nichomachean Ethics VI. 8. 5. Thomas Aquinas, in lectio 3 of his commentary on the Ethics, says that “a young man (juvenis) lacks knowledge of things pertaining to moral science. Such things are known chiefly through experience, but a young man is inexperienced in the works of human life because he has not lived long enough.” (Opera Omnia, ed. Roberto Busa [Stuttgart, 1980] 4:135). Roger Bacon, Opus Maius IV. 3, ed. J. H. Bridges (1879–1900, repr. Frankfurt, 1964), 1:105, says, “For Aristotle says in the sixth book of the Ethics that the young can quickly learn mathematics but not . . . moral science.”

6. James A. Weisheipl, “Classification of Sciences in Medieval Thought,” Mediaeval Studies 27 (1965): 54–90; Roger Baron, “L’Insertion des Arts dans la Philosophie chez Hugues de Saint-Victor,” in Arts Libéraux et Philosophie au Moyen Age, Actes du Quatrième Congrès International de Philosophie Mèdièvale (Montreal, 1969), 551–55; Richard McKeon, “The Organization of Sciences and the Relations of Cultures in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed. John E. Murdoch and Edith D. Sylla (Boston, 1975), 151–92; Nicholas H. Steneck, “A Late Medieval Arbor Scientiarum,” Speculum 50 (1975): 245–69; Cary J. Nederman, “Aristotelianism and the Origins of ‘Political Science’ in the Twelfth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991): 179–94; Joseph S. Freedman, “Classifications of Philosophy, the Sciences, and the Arts in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe,” The Modern Schoolman 72 (1994): 36–65.

7. In Isagogen Porphyrii Commentorum Editione Primis, ed. Samuel Brandt, Corpus Scriptorem Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 48 (Vienna, 1906), 8–9.

8. Ed. Charles Jourdain in Excursions Historiques et Philosophiques (Paris, 1888, repr. 1966), 59.

9. Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones, II.iii. 4 and 7, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1937), 110.

10. Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum, II. 24, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911), unpaginated.

11. Weisheipl, “Classification,” 64.

12. See A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100–1700 (Oxford, 1953), 21; and Roger Baron, Science et Sagesse chez Hugues de Saint-Victor (Paris, 1957), 59–60. Augustine, City of God VIII. 4, says that practical science concerns “ways of living, the formation of morals.” Cassian, “De Spirituali Scientia” (De Collatio Decima Quarta, PL 49:954), says that the end of practical science is “the correction of morals and the purgation of vice.”

13. Didascalicon I. 7, ed. C. H. Buttimer (Washington, 1939); trans. Jerome Taylor (New York, 1961).

14. De Divisione Philosophiae, ed. Ludwig Baur in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters 4, nos. 2–3 (1903), 17. See Aristotle, Metaphysics II.i. (993 b 19–21): “The object of theoretic knowledge is the truth; that of practical knowledge is action [ergon].”

15. Pedersen, “Theorica,” 155, 158. The usage survives where Latin is still employed, as in the encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998) of Pope John Paul II, cap. 3, #25, where theorica is a seeking for objective truth and practica is a desire for the good to be performed.

16. Claude Lafleur, ed., Quatre Introductions à la Philosophie au XIIIe Siècle: Textes Critiques et Étude Historique (Montréal, 1988), 257 and note to lines 1–15.

17. Arnulfi Provincialis, Divisio Scientarum, in Lafleur, Quatre Introductions, 301.

18. Ibid., 315.

19. Advancement of Learning II. vii. 1.

20. Li Livres dou Trésor I. 4, ed. P. Chabille (Paris, 1863), 7–8.

21. Dante says (Inferno XV, 82) that Brunetto taught him “how man makes himself eternal.” See Gundissalinus, as cited in note 14 above, on practica as teaching how to act in this life so as to hope for eternal life.

22. Confessio Amantis VII, 41–46, ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS, ES. 82 (Oxford, 1901, repr. 1957).

23. Li Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune, ed. Suzanne Solente (Paris, 1959) lines 7721–24.

24. Ibid., 7757–61.

25. Jourdain, ed., Excursions, 59.

26. Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose, 12802–06, ed. Ernest Langlois (Paris, 1921). Lines 44c–44e of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue associate “scoles” with “clerkes” and practyk” with “the werkman.”

27. W. F. Bryan and Germain Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (New York, 1958), 213–15; Riverside Chaucer, 865.

28. See note 3 above; also C. H. Haskins, Studies in Mediaeval Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), 105; and Paul Kunitzsch, Der “Almagest”: Die Syntaxis Mathematica des Claudius Ptolemäus in arabischen-lateinischer Überlieferung (Wiesbaden, 1974), 97.

29. Lafleur, Quatre Introductions, 152, notes that the Almagest was so far beyond the scientific competencies of Arts masters that almost no one read it from cover to cover. They commonly contented themselves with the introductory chapter.

30. Opus Maius Part VII. 4, ed. Bridges, 2:267; anonymous commentary on Sacrobosco’s De Spera, ed. (from thirteenth-century MSS) by Lynn Thorndike in The “Sphere” of Sacrobased and Its Commentators (Chicago, 1949), 426; Burley, Vita et Moribus, ed. Hermann Knust (Tübingen, 1886), 372. Burley’s Latin was translated early into Spanish and later into German and Italian.

31. Roman, lines 7007–13; Pèlerin, Eleccions, Prologue, in Oxford, St. John’s College MS 164, fol. 134v, quoting “le tresreverent Ptholomee devers le commencement de almageste”: “Celui n’est pas de tout mort qui les sciences a vivifiées, come cil n’est pas povre qui a seigneurie de intelligence & de son entendement”; Gower, Mirour, ed. G. C. Macaulay in The Complete Works of John Gower, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1899, repr. 1968), lines 12451–56; de Pizan, Le Livre des Fais et Bonnes Meurs du Charles V, part 3, chap. 3, ed. Suzanne Solente (Paris, 1942), 2:164; Manciple’s Tale, H 329–31; Wife of Bath’s Prologue, D 180–81 and 326–27.

32. Vita et Moribus, 372 and 370.

33. See Aristotle, Metaphysics VI.1 (1026 a 17–19): “Hence there will be three theoretical sciences: mathematics, physics, and theology.”

34. Fr. Boll, “Studien über Claudius Ptolemäus,” Jahrbücher fur Classische Philologie, Supplementband 21 (1894), 51–244, esp. 71, where he concludes that Almagest I. 1, while generally Aristotelian, reflects the ethical reform-movement of the time in which it was written.

35. See note 29, above.

36. Grosseteste’s in his commentary on Aristotle’s Analytica Posteriora; Aquinas’s in his commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate; Albert’s in his Physica, De Intellectu et Intelligibilia, and Metaphysica; Campanus’s in his Theorica Planetarum; Bacon’s in his Opus Maius. I have also found such citations in the works of lesser or anonymous authors.

37. Opus Maius, Part VII, part 1, ed. Bridges 2:223.

38. Ibid., 2:224. William of Ockham, in the Prologue to his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, argues that a proposition in theorica that is used in a syllogism concerning what ought to be done becomes thereby a principle in practica. See David W. Clark, “William of Ockham on Right Reason,” Speculum 48 (1973): 27 and note 40.

39. Opus Maius, Part VII, part 3, chapter 4, ed. Bridges 2:267.

40. See House of Fame, lines 904–07; Parlement of Foules, lines 57–58; Troilus V, 814–19. Chaucer is drawing on, among others, Boethius (who cites Ptolemy), Macrobius, Boccaccio, and Dante. See A. L. Kellogg, “On the Tradition of Troilus’s Vision of the Little Earth,” Mediaeval Studies 22 (1960): 204–13.

41. See Bacon, Opus Maius, Part IV, ed. Bridges 1:36, saying that earth stands in relation to the heavens “as the center-point of a circle stands in relation to the circumference.” See the demonstration in Almagest I. 6 that with respect to the sphere of fixed stars earth has “the ratio of a point” (or “resoun of a prykke,” as Chaucer puts it in Boece II, pr. 4).

42. Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas, La Semaine, quoted in Joshua Sylvester’s translation by A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 101.

43. Fais et Bonnes Meurs III. 3, ed. Solente 2:17. In quoting, Christine has omitted the following (which I supply from the Huntington Library’s MS HM65, fol. 3r: “Indeed nothing is more helpful in sharpening our inner eyes and intellect for considering what by means of actions becomes like the divine, on account of ordered and unvarying goodness and lack of arrogance.” (. . . immo nichil est ea magis addiuvans ad accuendos nostros interiores oculos et intellectus ad considerandi ea que operibus similantur divinis propter bonitatem moderaminis et equalitatis et parvitatem arrogantie . . .).

44. Fais et Bonnes Meurs III. 63, ed. Solente 3:164.

45. Lectio 3 of Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics I, ed. Busa, Opera Omnia, 4:145.

46. Readings that present the Wife as an icon of evil or as a sociopath or murderess or prostitute do not seem to be really felt. Rather they seem willful, perverse, or fanciful. I cite as an instance my own note on the Wife as prostitute in ELN 28 (1990): 16.

47. John Speirs, Chaucer the Maker (London, 1964), 141.

48. E. T. Donaldson, ed., Chaucer’s Poetry (New York, 1958), 1076.

49. Susan Morrison, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Exemplaria 8 (1996): 112.

50. Lee Patterson, “‘For the Wyves love of Bathe,’” Speculum 58 (1983): 682.

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