Abstract
This chapter explores children in Chaucer’s work between seven and fourteen years of age, beginning with the ten-year-old Lowys, the son of the poet, depicted in the Treatise on the Astrolabe. When a child is silent, as litel Lowys is, the artifacts and objects surrounding that child—toys, cradles, and even astrolabes—create a material context that makes a reading of that child possible. The children addressed here include the anonymous schoolmate of the litel clergeon, the two daughters of the widow in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the maid child of the Shipman’s Tale, Canacee of the Squire’s Tale, and Emelye of the Knight’s Tale.
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Notes
- 1.
John of Trevisa, On the Properties of Things, ed. M.C. Seymour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 291.
- 2.
Ratis Ravis and Other Moral and Religious Pieces, in Prose and Verse, ed. J. Rawson Lumby, EETS, o.s. 43 (London: N. Trübner, 1870), 26–103 (33).
- 3.
Sue Sheridan Walker, “Proof of Age of Feudal Heirs in Medieval England,” Medieval Studies 35 (1973): 306–323 (307).
- 4.
John Bedell, “Memory and Proof of Age in England, 1272–1327,” Past and Present 162 (1999): 3–27.
- 5.
Ibid., 5.
- 6.
Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 45. See also Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth and Politics 1377–99 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 7.
Orme, 46.
- 8.
Paul Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (New York: Viking, 2014).
- 9.
Marijane Osborn, Time and the Astrolabe in The Canterbury Tales (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 52.
- 10.
Ibid., 39.
- 11.
Lumby, Ratis Raving, 57–58.
- 12.
Patricia Ingham, “Little Nothings: The Squire’s Tale and the Ambition of Gadgets,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 53–80. See also, J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human: The Making of the Medieval Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
- 13.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Sigmund Eisner and Marijane Osborn, “Chaucer as Teacher: Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe,” in Medieval Children, ed. Daniel T. Kline (New York: Routledge, 2003): 155–187.
- 16.
Eisner describes it as follows: “[The astrolabe is] designed like a modern circular slide rule, with all moving parts pivoting from the center of the disk. On the front of the astrolabe is a fixed plate showing the visible sky for a given latitude. Over the plate pivots a rete, a network that shows the moving bodies in the sky and the signs of the zodiac. The stars and the zodiac move together and are all shown on the rete. Over the rete lies a label that pivots at the center and runs from rim to rim. A cross is by the rim at the top of the disk, and letters running around the disk indicate the twenty-four hours of the day. … The back of the astrolabe contains a pivoted rule with two fins, perforated by two holes, one small and the other large. The back serves as a protractor, for with the rule, which is somewhat like a gunsight, one can learn the altitude of either the sun or another visible star. The user of the astrolabe hangs it from his thumb and lets the sun shine through the smaller pair of holes on the label or observes a star through the larger pair of holes. Using the protractor on the rim of the back, one can determine a star’s altitude” (“Chaucer as Teacher: Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe,” 155).
- 17.
James Burge, Heloise and Abelard: A New Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 122.
- 18.
R. T. Gunther, Chaucer and Messahalla on the Astrolabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929). Lynn Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). The spelling of Massahalla’s name varies as does his ethnic identification. I have adopted North’s rendering.
- 19.
All quotations are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
- 20.
While “womb” connotes “stomach” or any part of the digestive system, it also connotes uterus. See MED 5a: “the human uterus, womb; also fig.; specif. the womb of the Virgin Mary; also, the vaginal canal, vagina.”
- 21.
Clocks and calendars in Chaucer’s time were notoriously unreliable.
- 22.
Augustine, Against the Academicians; The Teacher, trans. Peter King (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995). “Peter Abelard, ‘Carmen ad Astralabium’: A Critical Edition,” ed. and trans. Josepha Marie Annais Rubingh-Bosscher, PhD diss. Rijksuniversiteit te Groningen, 1987.
- 23.
Caroline Walker Bynum’s Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) has provoked a considerable amount of scholarship on the subject. Medieval Mothering, ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1996) is but one example. Essays such as Pamela Sheingorn’s “The Maternal Behavior of God: Divine Father as Fantasy Husband” (77–99), Rosemary Drage Hale’s “Joseph as Mother: Adaptation and Appropriation in the Construction of Male Virtue” (101–116), and Susanna Fein’s “Maternity in Aelred of Rievaulx’s Letter to His Sister” (139–156) make a strong case for male appropriation of the maternal as a cultural phenomenon.
- 24.
The quadrivium, the more advanced component of the medieval curriculum, was otherwise reserved for university students four to six years older than Lewis is here.
- 25.
See Thomas and Karen Jambeck, “Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe: A Handbook for the Medieval Child,” in Children’s Literature: The Great Excluded 3 (1974), 117–122.
- 26.
A Fifteenth Century School Book: From a Manuscript in the British Museum (MS Arundel, 249), ed. William Nelson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 1–2. Also quoted by Nicholas Orme in English Schools in the Middle Ages (New York: Methuen, 1973), 138–139. The fourteenth-century story of the Child of Bristowe is relevant to this context as well. See The Child of Bristowe: A Legend of the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1886; reprint University of Michigan Library, npa).
- 27.
Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1973), 127.
- 28.
Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
- 29.
Ibid., 80.
- 30.
Ibid., 81.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
P.J.P. Goldberg, Medieval England: A Social History, 1250–1550 (London: Bloomsbury, 2004); see also Sara M. Butler, Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval Medicine (New York: Routledge, 2014).
- 33.
Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Narratives of a Nurturing Culture: Parents and Neighbors in Medieval England,” Essays in Medieval Studies 12 (1995): http://www.illinoismedieval.org.
- 34.
Deborah Youngs, The Life Cycle in Western Europe, c 1300–c.1500 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 92.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
According to Kim M. Phillips, “Wardship was an investment and could be very profitable. The guardian of a royal ward held rights in the person, marriage and lands of the young heir. Rents and profits from the land were due to the guardian, who could also make a significant sum through selling the ward’s marriage, and to whom damages were payable in cases of his or her abduction.” See Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 33.
- 37.
Orme, “Chaucer and Education,” 48.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova Across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010).
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); Peter Travis, Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
- 42.
Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, 83.
- 43.
Peter Travis, “Chaucer’s Trivial Fox Chase and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18.2(1988): 195–220.
- 44.
Piers Plowman comes to mind here, but also “The Ballad of the Tyrannical Husband,” a fifteenth-century incomplete poem about the role reversal of a plowman and his wife. The debate on who does more domestic labor—she taking care of the children, barnyard animals, and doing all the food preparation, while he plows—provides a glimpse into one of many gender debates in the Middle Ages. See The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002). 85–93.
- 45.
Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 28, 33.
- 46.
The New English Bible with Aprocrypha, ed. Samuel Sandmel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 578.
- 47.
Peter Beidler, “Medieval Children Witness their Mothers’ Indiscretions: The Maid Child in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 44 (2009): 186–204.
- 48.
As Beidler concludes, “Unlike the unfaithful mothers of ‘The Man Who Kicked the Stone’ and Decameron, 7.3, who show no interest in giving moral or practical education to their sons, the wife of Saint Denis takes seriously her responsibility as a mother who needs to teach, by her own example, her vulnerable young daughter” (204).
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Sue Sheridan Walker, “The Marriage of Feudal Wards in Medieval England,” Journal of Medieval History 8 (1982): 123–134.
- 52.
Gower more frequently spells Canace without the double e at the end as Chaucer does to indicate, perhaps, an alternate pronunciation.
- 53.
Sara Gutman, “Chaucer’s Chicks: Feminism and Falconry in The Knight’s Tale, The Squire’s Tale, and The Parliament of Fowles,” in Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 69–83.
- 54.
Introduced by Bill Brown in a special issue of Critical Inquiry, the theory has been taken up by many since, including Jane Bennett.
- 55.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 20.
- 56.
Ibid.
- 57.
William F. Woods, “‘My Sweete Foo’: Emelye’s Role in The Knight’s Tale,” Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 276–306.
- 58.
Ibid., 294.
- 59.
So too the warrior woman, Zenobia, appears briefly in the Monk’s Tale. As Christine de Pizan tells it, Zenobia was the queen of the Palmyrenenes, “a lady of noble blood and offspring of the Ptolemies, kings of Egypt…. As soon as she was even slightly strong, no one could keep her from leaving the residence of walled cities, palaces, and royal chambers in order to live in the woods and forests, where, armed with sword and spear, she eagerly hunted wild game…. This maiden despised all physical love and refused to marry for a long time, for she was a woman who wished to keep her virginity for life” (52). See Lorraine Stock, “Amazons,” in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2006), 16–17. Also, Kim M. Phillips, “Warriors, Amazons, and Isles of Women: Medieval Travel Writing and Constructions of Asian Femininities,” in Intersections of Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 183–207.
- 60.
Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 41.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Ibid, 47.
- 64.
Keiko Hamaguchi, “Domesticating Amazons,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 331–354. See also Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), esp. Chap. 5, “Amazons at the Gate.”
- 65.
Hamaguchi, 350.
- 66.
Timothy D. O’Brien, “Fire and Blood: Queynte Imaginings in Diana’s Temple,” The Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 157–167.
- 67.
Woods, 295.
- 68.
The History of Herodotus, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 322.
- 69.
Kim M. Phillips, “Maidenhood as the Perfect Age of Woman’s Life,” in Young Medieval Women, ed. Katherine J. Lewis, Noël James Menuge and Kim M. Phillips (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 5.
- 70.
Nancy Bradley Warren, “Olde Stories and Amazons: The Legend of Good Women, the Knight’s Tale, and Fourteenth-Century Political Culture,” in Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn P. Collette (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 83–104.
- 71.
As quoted in Warren, 99. See Philippe de Mézières, Letter to King Richard II: A Plea Made in 1395 for Peace Between England and France, ed. and trans. G. W. Coopland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1975), 115.
- 72.
Warren, 99.
- 73.
Richard Maidstone: Concordia (The Reconciliation of Richard II with London), trans. A. G. Rigg, ed. David R. Carlson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003).
- 74.
Shahar, 166.
- 75.
See note 9 in the introduction for a list of these works.
- 76.
Shahar, 167.
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Salisbury, E. (2017). Pueritia: Boys and Girls. In: Chaucer and the Child. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43637-5_4
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