Imprecise Chaucer

In an ongoing effort to sort Chaucer’s vocabulary into classes of things, I have found that in some instances it is impossible to determine with precision just what Chaucer meant or, indeed, that he himself even meant to be precise. Thus it is hard to classify certain items that appear in his vocabulary. At the 2004 New Chaucer Society Congress I gave a paper on the problem of identifying the “eyryssh bestes” that he refers to in the House of Fame (932, 965). Are they fallen angels, fairies, or arcane elements in the structure of the natural world? Chaucer trims his sails in such a way, I think, that it is impossible to set a clear course to an answer. To take a simpler case, consider the Apostles James: there are two of them. When the Wife of Bath refers to Saint James in her prologue (III 312), does she, or Chaucer, mean James of Compostela or the author of the Epistle of Saint James? When Chaucer refers to the Epistle (at ClT, IV 1154; Mel, VII 1517, 1869), does he know which James wrote it? (Brunetto Latini and Dante, by the way, both got it wrong.)¹ But my purpose here is not to take the measure of James the Greater and James the Less, as they were and are sometimes called. Rather, I want to caution against assuming that Chaucer uses modes of measure, especially of time, with reliable precision.

There are, of course, various kinds of imprecision—accidental, intentional, and perceptual. One arises from mere error, or the “Homer nods” syndrome. Take, for example, the notorious case in which Chaucer evidently wrote that Zenobia’s pregnancy, during which she would not have sex with her husband, came to term in less than forty days (MkT, VII 2289); only two late scribes acted on the knowledge that gestation would require (about) forty weeks.² Perhaps a comparable lapsus mentis occurs in the Parson’s Prologue, where an elaborate time reference includes misidentification of Libra as the moon’s exaltation; it is in fact Saturn’s exaltation.³ Otherwise the time scheme is exact, if we accept that “Ten of the clokke,” the common manuscript reading at line 5, is a scribal error for “Foure of the clokke”⁴ (rather than an authorial gaffe, as days for weeks in the Monk’s Tale probably is). And what are we supposed to make of lines IV 2132–33 of the Merchant’s Tale, in which eight days are said to have passed, as nearly all the manuscripts read, “er the month of Juyl”? Lines IV 2222–24 make clear that the time frame is early June. Editors offer various treatments of this passage, and opinions remain divided on how the text should be constituted or understood. Is Chaucer to blame? His scribe? Or does the misprision lie in the lens through which the modern reader views Chaucer’s language?⁵

By contrast, Chaucer bears full responsibility for the time scheme in the Man of Law’s headlink (II 1–14), which involves a peculiar sleight of hand as well as an error. There are two measures of hours: equal hours of the clock and unequal hours of the “artificial” day (the time between sunrise and sunset divided by twelve). Harry Bailly begins his estimation of time using unequal hours—“the brighte sonne / The ark of his artificial day hath ronne / The ferthe part, and half an houre and moore” (II 1–3)—but then he switches to a different mode of calculation to arrive at a clock hour, 10 a.m., different from that which his first approach would have produced. Even if we accept Marijane Osborn’s argument that Harry’s first glimpse at the sun is for purposes not of calculation but merely of general orientation, still the precise clock hour turns out to be superfluous information, for the Host simply returns to his original orientation and states it in terms vaguer than his earlier estimate: “The fourthe party of this day is gon” (II 17). And this fourth part makes no obvious sense to the casual observer, whether...