The Scribe of Bodleian Library MS Bodley 619 and the Circulation of Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe

Who were the early readers of Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe? The dedication of the work in its prologue to Chaucer’s ten-year-old son Lewis indicates its immediate intended audience, but references elsewhere in the text suggest that it was also aimed at a wider readership. In the prologue Chaucer addresses “every discret persone that redith or herith this litel tretis,” begging them to excuse his “rude endityng” and “superfluite of wordes.”¹ That Chaucer’s work was indeed widely read throughout the fifteenth century is apparent from the large number of surviving witnesses: a total of thirty-three manuscripts or fragments survive, the largest number for any Chaucerian text after the Canterbury Tales. Embarrassed by the apparent popularity of a work that seems so foreign to our modern view of Chaucer’s attractions scholars have sought to explain away this situation as an aberration. E. T. Donaldson, for instance, proposed that the survival of a large number of manuscripts was the result of the dullness of its content which ensured that they were not harmed by overuse.² More recently there has been a resurgence of interest in this text, its status as a translation, its audience and reception. Scholars have particularly emphasized its reception within the fifteenth-century scientific community, and the tendency of scribes and compilers to expand upon Chaucer’s unfinished treatise, and to copy it alongside other related astronomical works.³ Of particular importance in this reconsideration of the text and its audience are the manuscripts themselves, and the evidence they provide for the text’s readership. In this essay I aim to reconsider the evidence for the copying and consumption of one such manuscript to show how study of these numerous primary witnesses can shed important light on questions of audience and reception.

Bodleian Library MS Bodley 619, a copy of Chaucer’s Astrolabe traditionally dated to the early fifteenth century, is an important witness to the early academic circulation of Chaucer’s work. Its text of the treatise belongs to the superior alpha tradition, a text characterised by a particular order of the conclusions and the omission of all the probably spurious supplementary conclusions. Bodley 619 is considered by most editors to be the best surviving witness to that text, although it differs from all other alpha witnesses except one in the inclusion of supplementary conclusion 46.⁴ The excellence of its text led to its use as a base text for the editions of F. N. Robinson, the Riverside Chaucer and the Variorum series.⁵ The only other contender for base text is Cambridge University Library MS Dd.3.53, another early and accurate witness to the superior alpha textual tradition. This manuscript was adopted by W. W. Skeat and J. H. Fisher as the base text for their editions of the Astrolabe, although this preference was based more upon its inclusion of diagrams than the superiority of its text.⁶

The excellence of its text and the accuracy of its arithmetic have led many scholars to suggest that Bodley 619 was produced and read by learned astronomers. This view has been encouraged by the identification of the scribe of Bodley 619 himself as an astronomer with connections

Bodleian Library MS Bodley 619, fol. 1v. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

to Merton College, Oxford, a major centre of astronomy in the fifteenth century. This suggestion appears to have originated with M. H. Liddell in his edition of the treatise for the Globe Chaucer, where he claims that “MS. Bodley 619 . . . bears evidence of having been written by an Astronomer of Merton College.”⁷ The claim was subsequently repeated by P. Pintelon and F. N. Robinson, while J. A. W. Bennett’s discussion of the relationship between Chaucer’s works and the Merton school of astronomers also drew upon this identification: “The Astrolabe of Chaucer itself became an Oxford text inasmuch as at least one copy of it (MS...