Time and the Astrolabe in “The Canterbury Tales” by Marijane Osborn (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER As a catalogue the book is also flawed. There are some organizational schemes at work in the book that are helpful in finding material. Besides the schematic organization of the chapters, within each chapter Ogden discusses texts chronologically, and the chapters are broken up into sections and subsections, as in Chapter 5, which has a section entitled ‘‘The Use of the Body,’’ with subsections entitled ‘‘Characterization,’’ ‘‘The Means of Conveying Emotions,’’ and ‘‘Attitudes and Acts Adapted from Ritual.’’ All of this is reflected in a very detailed table of contents. But the scope of the material means that Ogden does not have the opportunity to be complete. Instead, he must choose representative examples and place them in a context by briefly discussing other examples. The result is good to that extent but is difficult to work with if one is trying to mine the book for information. As a second step after Young’s Drama of the Medieval Church, the results are mixed. On the one hand, there are serious deficiencies of the sort I have noted. But on the other, Ogden’s work provides what he hopes it will provide, an exciting start for an interesting avenue of exploration . Erick Kelemen Columbia College Marijane Osborn. Time and the Astrolabe in ‘‘The Canterbury Tales.’’ Series for Science and Culture, vol. 5. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Pp. xvii, 350. $49.95. The planispheric astrolabe is an elegant, attractive instrument with clerical and scholarly connotations, and Europeans who wrote about it from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries were sometimes inspired by it to think rather large thoughts. It is said to organize liturgical time according to God’s own hours and seasons. The great world is said to be quartered upon it in likeness of the four ages into which a life is quartered in the little world of man. The part of the instrument that holds coordinates for various latitudes is called the mater because it contains the whole world within itself. It is said that by means of an astrolabe one can rationally grasp something of the veiled, the hidden, and the divine and that by contemplation of the visible sphere one can attain PAGE 414 414 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:48 PS REVIEWS to the frontiers of the invisible. The study and use of it are recommended to great men for the shaping of their moral character. Though it is expressed and unfolded in physical matter, the astrolabe is said to be an instrument of the soul. If the astrolabe inspired such thoughts as these in Geoffrey Chaucer, he did not utter them in his workmanlike and plainspoken Treatise on the Astrolabe. But they might have come out indirectly in his poetry, and it is the business of Osborn’s book to discover whether they did and if so where, in what ways, and to what effect. Osborn’s general method comprises several steps. She first identifies those passages—particularly in the Canterbury Tales, though other works are mentioned where relevant—that refer or seem to refer to the stars and the astrolabe in their nonastrological, time-telling function. (‘‘Time,’’ say Aristotle and his medieval followers, ‘‘is the measure of motion in the primum mobile,’’ and as Osborn notes, the astrolabe is the instrument for the astronomy of the primum mobile.) She then supplies the historical and scientific information necessary for getting at the verbal meaning of each passage. Finally, she explores how far it is possible reasonably to go in interpreting the poetry in light of that information . It is up to each reader to judge how far that might be, and indeed Osborn sometimes approaches the limits of her own credulity, saying on one occasion, ‘‘This reading is admittedly a gamble’’ (p. 101) and saying in reference to certain allusions that they have hitherto gone unnoticed, ‘‘if they exist at all’’ (p. 269). There are in the book a great many instances of the expressions ‘‘perhaps’’ and ‘‘it may be’’ and the like, although such phrases as ‘‘proves beyond a doubt’’ (p. 150) also occur. The main thesis that emerges from Osborn’s procedures is...