UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA

STUDIES IN
LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CRITICISM

Number 2

ASTRONOMICAL LORE IN CHAUCER

BY

FLORENCE M. GRIMM, A. M.
Assistant in the University of
Nebraska Library

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

Louise Pound, Ph. D., Department of English
H. B. Alexander, Ph. D., Department of Philosophy
F. W. Sanford, A. B., Department of Latin.

LINCOLN
1919

CONTENTS

ASTRONOMICAL LORE IN CHAUCER

I

Astronomy in the Middle Ages

The conspicuousness of astronomical lore in the poetry of Chaucer is due to its importance in the life of his century. In the mediaeval period, astronomy (or ‘astrology,’ for the two names were used indifferently to cover the same subject) was one of the vital interests of men. The ordinary man of the Middle Ages knew much more than do most men to-day about the phenomena of the heavens; conveniences such as clocks, almanacs, and charts representing celestial phenomena were rare, and direct observations of the apparent movements and the relative positions of the heavenly bodies were necessary for the regulation of man’s daily occupations. Furthermore, the belief in a geocentric system of the universe, which in Chaucer’s century was almost universally accepted, was of vast significance in man’s way of thinking. Accepting this view, all the heavenly bodies seemed to have been created for the sole benefit of man, inhabiting the central position in the universe; their movements, always with reference to the earth as a center, brought to man light, heat, changes of season—all the conditions that made human life possible on the earth.

Not only did the man of the Middle Ages see in the regular movements of the celestial spheres the instruments by which God granted him physical existence, but in the various aspects of heavenly phenomena he saw the governing principles of his moral life. The arrangement of the heavenly bodies with regard to one another at various times was supposed to exert undoubted power over the course of terrestrial events. Each planet was thought to have special attributes and a special influence over men’s lives. Venus was the planet of love, Mars, of war and hostility, the sun, of power and honor, and so forth. Each was mysteriously connected with a certain color, with a metal, too, the alchemists said, and each had special power over some organ of the human body. The planet’s influence was believed to vary greatly according to its position in the heavens, so that to determine a man’s destiny accurately it was necessary to consider the aspect of the whole heavens, especially at the moment of his birth, but also at other times. This was called “casting the horoscope” and was regarded as of great importance in enabling a man to guard against threatening perils or bad tendencies, and to make the best use of favorable opportunities.

It is not astonishing, then, that the great monuments of literature in the mediaeval period and even much later are filled with astronomical and astrological allusions; for these are but reflections of vital human interests of the times. The greatest poetical work of the Middle Ages, Dante’s Divina Commedia, is rich in astronomical lore, and its dramatic action is projected against a cosmographical background reflecting the view of Dante’s contemporaries as to the structure of the world. Milton, writing in the seventeenth century, bases the cosmology of his Paradise Lost in the main on the Ptolemaic system, but makes Adam and the archangel Raphael discuss the relative merits of this system and the heliocentric view of the universe. The latter had been brought forth by Copernicus a century earlier, but even in Milton’s day had not yet succeeded in supplanting the old geocentric cosmology.

The view of the universe which we find reflected in Chaucer’s poetry is chiefly based on the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, though it shows traces of very much more primitive cosmological ideas. The Ptolemaic system owes its name to the famous Alexandrian astronomer of the second century A. D., Claudius Ptolemy, but is based largely on the works and discoveries of the earlier Greek philosophers and astronomers, especially Eudoxus, Hipparchus, and Aristarchus, whose investigations Ptolemy compiled and, along some lines, extended. Ptolemaic astronomy was a purely geometrical or mathematical system which represented the observed movements and relative positions of the heavenly bodies so accurately that calculations as to their positions at any given time could be based upon it. Ptolemy agreed with his contemporaries in the opinion that to assign causes for the celestial movements was outside the sphere of the astronomer. This was a proper field of philosophy; and the decisions of philosophers, especially those of Aristotle, were regarded as final, and their teaching as the basis upon which observed phenomena should be described.