Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe: A Handbook for the Medieval Child

Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe is seldom read nowadays except by the most conscientious student, then reluctantly; and for good reason: forbiddingly technical, the Treatise reflects little of the doctrinal "ernest" or winsome "game" for which Chaucer is admired. But, however ominous its subject matter, the Astrolabe is significant in the literary canon of the Middle Ages, for it is one of the few extant works written specifically for a child. This "litel tretys," the author tells us, was undertaken at the "besy praier" of his ten year old son Lewis. The child's eager opportuning and Chaucer's evident pride in his son's "abilite to lerne sciences touching nombres and proporciouns" allow the reader a rather uncharacteristic glimpse of the poet in a domestic moment. While historical records and his own poetry have familiarized us with Chaucer as a man of civil affairs, diplomatic confidant to the court, and literary entrepreneur, the Astrolabe discovers Chaucer the parent, one whose desire to instruct his son in the skills of the adult world warrants our attention in a very special way. Traditionally, social historians have rejected the notion that there existed in the Middle Ages either a concept of the child or a concomitant theory of his education. In his Centuries of Childhood, Philippe Aries, for example, notes that not until the fifteenth century does there appear an awareness of the special nature of the child and an educative process suitable to his condition. We have then, according to Professor Aries, "a change corresponding to a desire, new as yet, to adapt the master's teaching to the student's level. The desire to bring education within the pupil's understanding was in direct opposition not only to die medieval methods . . . but also to humanist pedagogy which made no distinction between child and man. . . ."¹ The Treatise on the Astrolabe belies both the date and the attitude, for within its brief compass there emerges a consistent, thoughtfully conceived, and humanely executed principle of instruction which attests not only Chaucer's awareness of his son as a child but also his concern for an appropriate pedagogical discipline.

Because the formal study of astronomy or its undifferentiated medieval synonym "astrology" was reserved for older students, Chaucer was wary that complicated equipment or murky abstractions might well dampen his son's fledgling interest. He consequently scales his program of instruction to the abilities and desires of young Lewis. Like the astrolabe Chaucer provides his son—one "so small" as to be "portatif aboute," this "litel tretys" is similarly manageable: its conclusions, drawn "under full light reules" in "light Englissh," are not "to harde to thy tendir age of ten yeer to conceyve." But, for all the diminutives, there is no hint of condescension. The astrolabe is, after all, "noble," "suffisant" for "oure orizonte." So, too, the manual, "rude" though it may be, rehearses problems which are nonetheless "trewe," their inferences "subtile" enough to explore the outer limits of Lewis' intellectual horizon. With characteristic modesty, indeed the kind of self-effacing diffidence which recalls the poet-narrator of the Canterbury Tales, the father assures young Lewis that this treatise is not of his own making: "I n'am but a lewd compilator of the labour of olde astrologiens, and have it translatid in myn Englissh oonly for thy doctrine."² That Chaucer translated his treatise in large part from the extant Compositio et Operatio Astrolabii of Messahala, an Egyptian astronomer of the eighth century, has been well established. In fact, as has been frequently noted, Chaucer follows Messahala's organizational scheme rather closely, beginning, like the Latin original, with a description of the astrolabe, its workings and capabilities, and concluding with a series of practical problems of graduated difficulty in its operation. But Chaucer's treatise is by no means a slavish rendering. Therein lies its importance. On the one hand, the collation of the two texts serves to illustrate Chaucer's mode of adapting his source to the needs of a ten year old; on the other, while...