Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading The Nun's Priest's Tale

Chaucerian Horologics and the Confounded Reader

267 SIX Chaucerian Horologics and the Confounded Reader What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled. —.  Just a few hours out of London on the pilgrimage to Canterbury, Harry Bailly, the pilgrims’ leader, suddenly decides to determine precisely what time of the day it is. He does this not by reading a portable mechanical clock,since these lightweight coiled-spring instruments were not invented until the fifteenth-century.1 Nor does he determine that it was the hour of ten ante meridian by consulting what was called a“chlyndre,”a portable dangling sundial such as that sported by the lecherous monk in The Shipman ’s Tale.2 Nor, as was most common in the Middle Ages, does he almost accidentally learn of the time by hearing bells rung from a tower in a nearby town or abbey. Rather, Harry uses his own extraordinary powers of discrimination to determine that, for this precise latitude, since the sun had run a bit more than a half hour more than the fourth part of its course through the artificial day, and since the shadow of every tree at this very moment was absolutely equal in length to the tree’s height, and since the date of this day could be inferred or known to be the eighteenth 268 D I S S E M I N A L C H AU C E R day of April, and since the sun had ascended precisely forty-five degrees into the sky,it could readily be asserted that,beyond all shadow of a doubt, it was exactly“ten of the clokke”(II.14). And by“clokke,”a word first recorded in English in 1371,3 Harry does not mean an old-fashioned sundial or water clock, but rather the newly invented mechanical clock that indicates sixty-minute, or equinoctial, hours whose length and termini remained constant throughout the day and year. This is an astonishing moment, not only in the entirety of Chaucer ’s literary corpus, but in all of medieval literature. To my knowledge, nowhere in Western literature before Harry’s calculation does a literary figure determine the exact, equinoctial hour of the day. Rather, in all medieval literature until at least the last quarter of the fourteenth century, time remained essentially what it had always been: natural and cursive, hours changing in length as the seasons expanded and contracted through the agricultural and liturgical year.4 Harry’s time-telling on the first day of the pilgrimage is in fact not the only moment when Chaucer’s conventional markings of time are ruptured by a technically convoluted temporal periphrasis.A second instance occurs at the very end of the pilgrimage,just before The Parson’s Tale, when Chaucer determines that the sun is descended from the meridian not quite twenty-nine degrees, that a man’s shadow is at this moment eleven times one-sixth the height of his body, that the zodiacal sign Libra is beginning to ascend above the horizon, and that it is precisely four of the clock. Such an egregiously complicated and technical time-measurement occurs in only one other place on the pilgrimage,this time inside a tale,namely,The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Chauntecleer, the tale’s rooster-protagonist, determines the precise equinoctial hour of the day since he knows“by nature”the degrees of the sun’s ascension; and the Nun’s Priest, the tale’s horologically challenged narrator, attempts to determine the month and date of that day via a calculation so convoluted that most readers refuse to go through the mental contortions necessary to arrive at anything close to the actual day upon which the events of this beast fable putatively happen. There are several extraordinary things about these three passages. The first oddity is that they are very rarely discussed by scholars other than editors. Until very recently, the only two scholars to have paid sustained attention to the scientific technicalities of these passages, Sigmund Eis- ner and John D. North, are both astronomers by training.5 But literary critics are not immediately to be faulted for their reluctance to engage in such scientific calculations, for the second unusual element concerning these time-telling episodes is that Chaucer’s ideal contemporary interpreter had to...