Abstract
Chaucer yields much to the critic intent on coming to terms with the lived experience of mirabilia in the late fourteenth century. But if in chapter 2 we saw the poet as cognoscenti, participant, and critic, in this chapter we will see Chaucer’s concerns with the more spiritual and historical implications of human relations with marvelous machines. Here Chaucer takes a darker view of awe-inspiring mechanicalia, invoking troubling metaphorical connections between the corpus, or natural body, and the new and clever devices with which he was coming to terms. It therefore seems worthwhile to extend the discussion of manmade marvels to trace the fainter imprint of their implications for the human spirit and body.
Until this century, the best mechanical analog for thought was clockwork (recognizably inferior to biology), and the fantasy of creating something with knowledge could be achieved only by giving the mysterious quality of life to some dead or inert mass, risking the gods’ wrath or vengeance.1
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Notes
Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 122–7.
Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
Guillemette Bolens and Paul Beckman Taylor, “Chess, Clocks, and Counsellors in Chaucer’s ‘Book of the Duchess,’” Chaucer Review 35, 3 (2001): 282.
Françoise Paheau, “Scientific Allusion and Intertextuality in Jean Froissart’s Li Orloge Amareuse,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1990): 271. Paheau emphasizes Froissart’s tendency to interpret technology according to the naturalized understanding of magic required to present the poet as magus.
Qtd. in Paheau, p. 264; Charles Dahlberg, trans., The Romance of the Rose (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 343.
Marylin Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn, Myth, Montage, & Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 81.
Virginia Wylie Egbert, “Pygmalion as Sculptor,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 28 (1966–67): 20–3.
Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 13–23.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)
David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995)
Kirby Farrell, “Thinking through Others,” Massachusetts Review 37 (1996): 213–35.
Chaucer’s father was a vintner, and his grandparents were pepperers. See Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 11–7.
Brian Stock, “Science, Technology, and Economic Progress in the Early Medieval West,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 47; Stock’s phrase is attractive for the extra-philosophical latitude he brings to the period’s nascent empiricism, securing the philosophical underpinnings of M. D. Chenu’s “mechanism minded” late medieval world. See also Richard Utz, ed., Literary Nominalism, Introduction.
The extensive scholarship on Chaucer and astronomy is too great to catalogue here, but is anchored in the works of Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Medieval Sciences, 2nd ed. (New York: Barns and Noble, 1960)
Sigmund Eisner, Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer 6: A Treatise on the Astrolabe (University of Oklahoma Press, 2002)
and ed., The Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980)
J. D. North, Chaucer’s Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
and Chauncey Wood, Chaucer and the Country of the Stars: Poetic Uses of Astrological Imagery (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970).
Jennifer Arch, “A Case against Chaucer’s Authorship of the Equatorie of Planetis,” Chaucer Review 40, 1 (2005): 64–6 lays out the likelihood of multiple users of equatories in London in Chaucer’s time; the British Museum houses an extensive collection of astronomical instruments bearing the hart symbol of Richard II.
Chiara Frugoni, Books, Banks, Buttons, and Other Inventions from the Middle Ages, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 92–3.
Ian Bishop, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Liberal Arts,” Review of English Studies New Series 30. 119 (August 1979): 259.
A. C. Crombie, Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), pp. 81–2.
Robert A. Pratt, “Some Latin Sources of the Nonnes Preest on Dreams,” Speculum 52 (1977): 538–70. Benson, Riverside Chaucer, n. 937.
Shiela Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) is the primary work for the discussion of Chaucer and skeptical thinking based in nominalism.
Robert A. Pratt, “Some Latin Sources of the Nonnes Preest on Dreams,” Speculum 52 (1977): 538–70.
Stanton J. Linden, Darke Hieroglyphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Renaissance (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1996), p. 24.
Sheila Delany, Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 16.
James M. Dean, “Dismantling the Canterbury Book,” PMLA 100 (1984): 751.
Lee Patterson, “Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993): 31.
William Newman, “Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages,” ISIS 80 (1989): 424–5. More recently, Newman has developed a formidable approach to Alchemy’s engagement with nature and art in Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Robert Schuler, “The Renaissance Chaucer as Alchemist,” Viator 15 (1984): 305–7.
For discussions of the negative implications of alchemy as techne, see Patterson, “Perpetual Motion,” p. 50, and Mark J. Bruin, “Art, Anxiety, and Alchemy in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 33 (1999): 33.
Alchemy was entering an especially precarious period in England in the later fourteenth century, as evidenced in Will G. Ogrinc’s “Western Society and Alchemy, 1200–1500,” Journal of Medieval History 6 (1980): 103ff., detailing the 1403 ban occasioned by the widespread perception of frauds committed by alchemists.
George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 15
confirms the majority opinion that Chaucer was skeptical of alchemical practices; for issues of the dehumanizing aspects of alchemy see John Speirs, Chaucer the Maker (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), pp. 96–7
Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 213–5
and Paul G. Ruggiers, The Art of the Canterbury Tales (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), pp. 132–4, who differentiates between Chaucer and the Yeoman, but who like many scholars fails to acknowledge the responses of “readers” of alchemy built into the text.
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© 2007 Scott Lightsey
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Lightsey, S. (2007). Chaucer’s Body: The Subject of Technology. In: Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605640_4
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