Transmedial Technics in Chaucer’s Treatise on the ...Chaucer’s Astrolabe may seem relatively restrained and unimaginative to readers expecting more in the way of the poet’s signature

Studies in the Age of Chaucer 40 (2018): 1–41� 2018 The New Chaucer Society

Transmedial Technics in Chaucer’s

Treatise on the Astrolabe: Translation,

Instrumentation, and Scientific

Imagination

J. Allan MitchellUniversity of Victoria

Abstract

An astrolabe is a versatile technical medium that rescales and renders aspects ofthe world at large. Accordingly, I argue that Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabeconfigures perceptions of the environment through varieties of simultaneoustranslation. As a translated text, the treatise mobilizes knowledge practicesdrawn from diverse languages and scientific cultures; as a technical object, theaccompanying device expresses correspondences among observed phenomena.The result is a technoscientific idealization of a common world propagated byprose instruction and physical instrumentation. Verbal, numerical, geometrical,and material figures are also joined by uncanny metaphors that augment andintensify the astrolabe’s ecological orientation. Affiliated zoomorphic images ofthe spider, horse, and eagle suggest that the instrument embodies more-than-human sentience and skill, virtually distributing agency across an imaginedmultispecies spectrum. The essay concludes with Chaucer’s cautious consider-ation of scientific intermediaries in The Squire’s Tale and The House of Fame.

Keywords

Geoffrey Chaucer; astrolabe; history of science; media archeology; globalMiddle Ages; eco-materialism; translation studies; cross-cultural studies; envi-ronmental history; anthropomorphism; multispecies spectrum; scientific imagi-nation

An earlier version of this essay was presented as a plenary lecture at the July 2015Biennial London Chaucer Conference. It has benefited from conversations with manyfriends and colleagues. I owe special thanks to Iain Higgins, Myra Seaman, JeffreyCohen, Lisa Cooper, Valerie Allen, Jenna Mead, and Seb Falk, and to the journal’sanonymous readers for keen and extremely generous feedback; thanks to the editor ofSAC, Sarah Salih, for guidance. All errors are my own. I am grateful to student interloc-utors in recent graduate seminars on medieval literature and scientific culture, and forthe research assistance of Erin Donoghue-Brooke. The Social Sciences and HumanitiesResearch Council of Canada (SSHRC) provided funding to carry out research on whichthis essay is based.

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STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER

Geoffrey chaucer’s treatise on the astrolabe de-scribes a multipurpose mechanism (all-in-one clock, compass, calculator,star map, and data storage-and-retrieval device) whose primary refer-ence is the predictable arrangement of empirical phenomena. Two offive projected parts make up the unfinished work: the first details thephysical components of a planispheric astrolabe, the second ranges overforty possible applications (“conclusions”). Tables with auxiliary datawere intended but not included. The spare, expository prose togetherwith the impulse to diagram and tabulate reflect a deliberate pedagogicstrategy, training up a ten-year-old boy, “Lyte Lowys my sone” (1).1

Adapting the matter to the needs of an amateur, Chaucer embraces anartless style (“full light reules and naked wordes in Englisshe” [21–22])and employs purposeful redundancy (what he calls “my superfluite ofwordes” [36]). For example, the border of the instrument is said to bemarked by degrees “from 5 to 5 as shewith by longe strikes bitwene”(135–39), and nearly 100 lines later the same information is presented.“Now have I tolde the twyes” (220). The next part progresses incremen-tally with a systematic explication of use-cases. The first describes howto find the sun’s longitude by setting the alidade on the back of theastrolabe to the day of the month and then reading off degrees; thesecond concerns the altitude of the sun, moon, or another celestial bodyby suspending the astrolabe from the right thumb and rotating the ali-dade until the sunlight shines through the holes, before noting thedegree of altitude; there follows a third technique for finding the timeof day or night, and so forth. Chaucer attends throughout to pragmaticmeans and soluble ends, issuing a stepped series of actions and calcula-tions to arrive at repeatable results, insisting on procedural clarity andcorrectness. The astrolabe emerges as a practical instrument, affordingefficient modes of information capture, conversion, and display, based insound observational methods.

Chaucer’s Astrolabe may seem relatively restrained and unimaginativeto readers expecting more in the way of the poet’s signature irony and

1 Geoffrey Chaucer, A Treatise on the Astrolabe, ed. Sigmund Eisner, in The Prose Trea-tises, Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Vol. 6, Part 1 (Norman:University of Oklahoma Press, 2002). All citations to the treatise will appear in paren-theses.

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TRANSMEDIAL TECHNICS IN TREATISE ON THE ASTROLABE

irresolution. Nor is it engaged in fabling or fictive world-making. Theprose treatise can seem the antithesis of the poetic, a momentary turnaway from well-appreciated forms of narrative invention and indirectionassociated with other traditions in which he wrote.2 Yet if the pragmaticpurpose and exposition occasion any ambivalence, the situation mayhelpfully expose unexamined assumptions about literary and technicalforms, then as now, and regarding the very notion of instrumentality.Chaucer’s role as translator and technical adviser, admired in the follow-ing centuries by the likes of John Lydgate, Gabriel Harvey, and JohnSelden, was not so hard to fathom at earlier moments in literary history.Within a few decades the handbook was circulating broadly, in overthirty manuscript copies, more than for any other work by Chauceroutside the Canterbury Tales.3 “Embarrassed by the apparent popularityof a work that seems so foreign to our modern view of Chaucer’s attrac-tions,” observes Simon Horobin, “scholars have sought to explain awaythis situation as an aberration.”4 How might readers better recognizethe particular significance of the Astrolabe? One way is to show how thetechnical matter applies to the literary, making use of the treatise tocalculate horoscopes, date fictional events, and interpret celestial allego-ries in the narrative poems.5 Another is to champion an earlier literary

2 For one thing, exact measures associated with the mathematical geometry of Ptol-emy and the algebra of al-Kwarizmi are preferred over the celestial metaphysics ofMacrobius or Martianus Capella. For another, an earnest account of factual and practicalinformation may be difficult to square with Chaucer’s characteristic ambivalence towardalleged expertise and the clerical elite. There is nothing like the satirical pressuresexerted elsewhere—exemplified by a well-placed astrolabe and copy of Ptolemy’s Alma-gest in The Miller’s Tale, or by the expose of mystifying alchemical operations in TheCanon Yeoman’s Tale—to qualify the acts and authority of science. My initial point is thatwithout those sharp edges, Chaucer’s Astrolabe is liable to yield an image of a moremundane, pragmatic, and plain-style Chaucer than many are accustomed to.

3 Chaucer himself anticipates a kinship, beyond little Lewis, with “every discret per-sone that redith or herith this litel tretis” (Astr, 34–35). For evidence of fifteenth-century readership, see Edgar Laird, “Chaucer and Friends: The Audience for The Trea-tise on the Astrolabe,” ChauR 41, no. 4 (2007): 439–44; Simon Horobin, “The Scribe ofBodleian Library MS Bodley 619 and the Circulation of Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astro-labe,” SAC 31 (2009): 109–24. Like the contemporary Equatorie of the Planetis, Chaucer’sAstrolabe would satisfy a growing coterie whose appetite for applied science was appar-ent. An English instruction manual on how to make and use another astronomicaldevice, The Equatorie of the Planetis was once attributed to Chaucer. For discussion seeKari Anne Rand, “The Authorship of The Equatorie of the Planetis Revisited,” Studianeophilologica 87 (2015): 15–35.

4 Horobin, “The Scribe of Bodleian Library MS Bodley 619,” 109.5 See, for example, J. D. North, Chaucer’s Universe (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1988) and his set of articles in RES 20: 78–80. Also Marijane Osborne, Time andthe Astrolabe in the “Canterbury Tales” (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).

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subjectivity, rightly insisting that, if Chaucer’s Astrolabe can appear outof place, the work should remain a thorn in the side of facile notions ofauthorship. Chaucer is a reminder that the accountant, administrator,amateur scientist, and literary artist can be found in the same person.6

Both are necessary approaches and yet, while showing renewed appreci-ation for the treatise, they may confirm that the work is ancillary toChaucer’s exhilarating literary fictions. A third claim is worth pressingalong with the others. Even as we enlarge conventional notions of liter-ary activity and authorship, we should grant the prosy, technoscientificobject its primacy. Chaucer devotes himself to a technical medium atleast as expressive and imaginative as any literary composition, perhaps“poetic” in older senses of constructing or compiling figures.7 Only here,we are not speaking of fashionable letters. The technical apparatusrather springs from a medieval “scientific imagination.”8 I argue that itis precisely from a pragmatic, object-oriented vantage that the technicalmatter may show itself as more than a mere appliance. Here the sinceretechnicity and barefaced instrumentality of the work poses a useful

6 That is why we should hesitate to accept John North’s suggested that Chaucer’spursuit of a computational science is congruent with the more familiar image of thepoet as an “ingenious schemer,” evidence for which there is none in the treatise itself;see North, Chaucer’s Universe, ix. The calculating mind on display in the astrolabe treatiseis rather more like the one he exercised at the computorium, the counting house whereChaucer worked for over a decade as Controller of the Customs. Notably, he began thetreatise around the time he retired as Clerk of the Works, an office in which he wouldhave had occasion to employ an astrolabe in civil engineering projects he oversaw at theTower of London or Windsor Castle. Accounting for poets who engage in counting is ageneral cultural problem as well as a specifically Chaucerian one. As Steven Connorobserves in his wry formulation of the modern “anti-numerical prejudice,” literary schol-arship has often foundered on the dilemma; see Living by Numbers: In Defense of Quantity(London: Reaktion, 2016).

7 See the useful remarks on poiesis in E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the LatinMiddle Ages, trans. Willard Task (London: Routledge, 1953), 145–47. Encouragementto look beyond belletristic appreciation to what technical matters may accomplish canalso be found in Lisa Cooper’s work on the “poetics of practicality” in how-to texts,inviting investigation into “whether insistently practical texts, those whose explicit goalis to assist their readers to make something in the world beyond the page (a book, aculinary dish, an ointment, an object), might be said to have a poetics and, if so, in whatthat poetics might be said to consist”; see Lisa Cooper, “The Poetics of Practicality,” inMiddle English: Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, ed. Paul Strohm(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 491–505 (492). Cf. Jonathan Sawday, Enginesof the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: Routledge,2007), xviii, who argues that early technoculture involves a “work of imagination.” Heobserves that “the elaborate devices of the artist-engineers of the Renaissance reacheddeep into early-modern political, aesthetic, and philosophical structures of thought.”

8 Edward Grant, The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages (Washington:The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 163ff.

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stumbling block, for Chaucer’s Astrolabe is sufficiently mundane as toperform a productive decentering of the model literary subject.9 Whatcomes into focus instead is the ingenuity and imaginative modality of anengrossing medium of geometry, geography, architecture, and practicalastronomy. It compels us to ask what it can mean to instrumentalize.

“Instrument-knowledge” has of course come to seem at odds withcivilizing, humanizing endeavors at least since Matthew Arnold.10 Mod-ern culture has segregated aesthetic and technical objects.11 Yet the ear-liest recorded instances of English “instrument” are found in Chaucer’swritings (in reference not just to a mechanism but also to bodily mem-bers), indicating that we had better be careful with assumptions thathave since accreted around that term to connote dehumanizing routinesor alienating machines.12 To start, the charisma of the astrolabe, “sonoble an instrument” (14), should not be underestimated. Finelycrafted, molded, and engraved, astrolabes were often ornamental as wellas useful, befitting something designed to mirror the cosmos, Greek for“order” and “ornament.” Aware of the implications, Stephen G. Nicholsconsiders Chaucer’s description “as essentially an ekphrasis of a work ofart (the astrolabe).”13 The connotations of musical instrumentation

9 We could insist, as a provisional heuristic, that Chaucer’s Astrolabe is instructiveprecisely as a conspicuous parergon (allegedly secondary or supplemental), evidently dis-tinct from the ergon of a creative, singular, masculine literary artist. The Kantian parergon(an effaced background, border, frame) is discussed in Jacques Derrida, The Truth inPainting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1987), 54–73.

10 As cited by Jentery Sayers, “Technology,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies,ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2014),available at http://hdl.handle.net/2333.1/rr4xh08x (accessed August 21, 2016). The riseof instrumental rationality has occasioned vigorous critiques leading to the further pejo-ration of the term, associating it with shallow thinking and worse; see, for example,Darrow Schecter, The Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas (New York:Continuum, 2010).

11 As Gilbert Simondon observes in The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans.Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2017), high cul-ture tends to banish technical objects “into a structureless world of things that have nosignification but only a use, a utility function,” neglecting their real social, historical,and aesthetic import (16).

12 See MED, s.v. instrument (n.), def. 1(a), where the first recorded usage of the wordto mean “[a] device operated by hand, a tool, an implement, a utensil” is attributed toThe Equatorie of the Planetis, which may be Chaucer’s composition (c. 1392). The morespecific sense (def. 1[d])—“an instrument used in astronomy or astrology”—is attestedin Chaucer’s Treatise (c. 1391). Definitions 1(b) (“a musical instrument”) and 1(c) (“asurgical instrument”) were also current. See also WBP, 149–50.

13 Stephen G. Nichols, “The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity inMedieval Culture,” in The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee,and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 1–27 (4).

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would also not be entirely out of place.14 That may exaggerate, butsuch notions do the service of pointing beyond literary to technologicalinvention, fascination, and sophistication. Chaucer’s Astrolabe is con-cerned with the capacity of an instrument to propagate alternative per-spectives and positional information, generate surprising associationsamong species, and access otherwise remote geographical regions. I willargue that, by taking the measure of times, places, and polities in theworld at large, the scientific apparatus constitutes an elegant and effi-cient multiscalar medium of translation.

For the effects of mediation and translation to register, however, weneed a rebooted critical methodology to restore fundamental competen-cies to technical objects. One sort of stimulus can be found in digitalhumanities, media archaeology, and platform studies.15 A forensics ofphysical machines and system could be just as productive in the studyof past technics. My working assumption is that instrumental tech-nologies make claims on attention, mount arguments, structure thoughtand feeling, and achieve functional objectives by eclectic means. Fur-ther encouragement may be found in nondualist eco-theory that under-scores the vital materiality, autonomy, and agency of physical artifacts.16

14 There is no direct reference to the consonance of the spheres producing celestialfrequencies in Chaucer’s Astrolabe, but instruments that measure time and space mustin a sense be attuned to the complex score of the cosmos. Medieval musicology is alsogrounded in number, interval, and ratio, and, as part of the quadrivium (i.e., the fourways of mathematical method, leading, by stages, to advanced arithmetical exercises),was preparatory to geometry and astronomy. See further Henry Chadwick, Boethius: TheConsolations of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy (Fairlawn: Clarendon Press, 1990),101; and Philipp Jeserich, Musica naturalis: Speculative Music Theory and Poetics, from SaintAugustine to the Late Middle Ages in France, trans. Michael J. Curley and Steven Randall(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 125–26.

15 I am thinking of the work of Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces: From theDigital to the Bookbound (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); MatthewKirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 2012); Wendy Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 2011); Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals andTechnology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Alexander Galloway,The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). Yet we should be careful not tocollapse the difference between old and new media, on which more later. A medievalscientific apparatus embodies unwired, analogue-era technology, and brings new con-texts to bear on debates in the digital humanities.

16 Key inspirations include Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technol-ogy, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs andWomen: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81; Bruno Latour,Aramis; or, The Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1996); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics andthe Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007);and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke

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Adapting a Spinozan formulation motivating recent eco-materialist phi-losophy, we can ask: What if we don’t know what the technical instru-ment can do?17 How might a device compile and transmit knowledgenot just through language but also by way of articulating pointers,plates, numbers, gestures, and speculative relations? Chaucer’s Astrolabehappens to be lucid about the way instrumentation actively embodiesand expresses understanding. At some moments, he limns the technicalobject a sort of extended organ of cognition and sensation. Chaucer’slanguage is provocative. He employs quasi-literary figures and, withthose vivifying traces of prosopopoeia, the functional device practicallycomes alive. An estranging notion of near sentient instrumentation iscorroborated in literary narratives to suggest what the device may repre-sent. In Chaucer, a gathering notion of the weird hybridity of technicalmatter starts to take shape along with the idea that astrolabic science,in practical ways, portends more-than-human intelligence.

This essay consequently proposes an inclusive, cross-disciplinary, eco-logical approach to technical modes of intermediation. It takes the astro-labe to be a transmedial interface. Arianna Borrelli has already defined“astrolabe” to include verbal expression and nonverbal mental concepts,practical procedures, visual diagrams, and physical objects workingtogether, clearing the ground for further analysis of the multimodalobject.18 Taking a wide-angle view, I insist that the astrolabe is tran-sected by yet other lines (e.g., mineral substance, numerical quantities,

University Press, 2010). While it once seemed natural to me to go to Martin Heideg-ger’s analysis of tool-being, my citations here and elsewhere in the essay reflect a prefer-ence for and endorsement of feminist and queer historians of science and technology. Ifind further stimulus in medieval scholarship that has started to reframe science, tech-nology, and technical ingenuity (e.g., E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic,Nature, and Art [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015], and PatriciaClare Ingham, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation [Philadelphia: Uni-versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2015]) and nonhuman ontologies (e.g., Jeffrey J. Cohen,Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015]).

17 See Gilles Deleuze, “What Can a Body Do?,” in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza(New York: Zone, 1990), 217–34 (226).

18 Arianna Borrelli, Aspects of the Astrolabe: “Architectonica Radio” in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Europe (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008), 17–18. Elsewhere she associatesthe astrolabe more broadly with the development of a “flat sphere,” which is both “aninstrument for the hands, like a pair of compasses, and one for the mind, like the rulesof logic.” See Arianna Borrelli, “The Flat Sphere,” in Variantology: On Deep Time Relationsof Arts, Sciences, and Technologies, ed. Siegfried Zielinski and David Link (Cologne: Wal-ther Konig, 2006), 145–66 (146). For this study I also benefit from databases andcatalogue descriptions of surviving instruments, including Epact: Scientific Instruments ofMedieval and Renaissance Europe (under the direction of Jim Bennett), https://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/epact/ (accessed March 24, 2018); F. A. B. Ward, A Catalogue of European

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external motions, and metaphors), obtaining its manifold utility by con-ducting aspects of both nature and culture. The transformative effectsmanifest themselves in varieties of simultaneous translatio (linguistic,numerical, geometrical, and technological). Accordingly, the first partof the essay addresses Chaucer’s theory and practice of translation tounderscore the translingual ecology at work in the Astrolabe. Butbecause an astrolabe is no mere verbal construct, I go on to mathematicsand material facture in the second part to show how magnitudes andmotions are made intelligible in the physical device. In turn, the mecha-nism lends itself to animating figures of speech, and so the third partreturns to the medium of language mindful of what lies beyond thetext. Mercurial metaphorical figures (spider, mother, horse, and eagle)reveal an uncanny hybridization within astrolabic science, which is fur-ther attested by zoomorphic imagery in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and TheHouse of Fame. What follows draws a thread through disparate elements,conjoining figures from overlapping domains that co-constitute scien-tific activity. The broader point I wish to make is that while early loca-tive and calculative technologies identify points and dimensions in theproximal environment—latitude, altitude, direction, time—they alsoregister pervasive cross-cultural and ecological entanglements. Theresult is a heterogeneous assemblage, embodying what I am calling atransmedial technics through which to engage the cosmos beyond thehuman. The astrolabe, in short, is practically worldly-wise.

Translation and Translingual Ecology

Chaucer’s Astrolabe may once have stoked triumphalist claims about therise of a native scientific culture. It continues to attract attention forwhat it might suggest about Chaucer’s ambitions as an innovative ver-nacular translator, leading some to suppose that the text and technologyare not so ecologically expansive. Granted, Chaucer relates his work to

Scientific Instruments in the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities of the British Museum(London: British Museum, 1981); Koenraad van Cleempoel and Silke Ackermann, eds.,Astrolabes at Greenwich: A Catalogue of the Astrolabes in the National Maritime Museum,Greenwich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Roderick Webster and MarjorieWebster, Western Astrolabes: Historic Scientific Instruments of the Adler Planetarium andAstronomy Museum, Vol. 1 (Chicago: Adler Planetarium, 1998); Robert William T.Gunther, Astrolabes of the World, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932); SharonGibbs with George Saliba, Planispheric Astrolabes from the National Museum of AmericanHistory (Washington: Smithsonian, 1984); and David King, Astrolabes from MedievalEurope, Variorum Collected Studies (New York: Routledge, 2011), Part 12.

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the cultural and political milieu of his day, deferring to “the king, thatis lord of this langage” (45–46). Scholars have accordingly argued thatthe treatise belongs to a larger project to promote himself or cultivateEnglish, by analogy with what has often been assumed to be maverickWycliffite efforts to translate the Bible.19 In this light, we may findourselves wondering if Chaucer has found an ideal territorializing devicein an English Astrolabe. Kathleen Biddick for one has attempted to arguethat the language of the treatise is implicated in a broader ethnocen-trism and exclusionary scientific rationalism in the period.20 Yet the sci-entific matter is not parochial in Chaucer’s case, exhibiting instead—inrespect of textual sources, terminology, and portable knowledge—aworldly orientation. Chaucer’s Astrolabe materializes the sort of linguisticecology that Jonathan Hsy associates with Chaucer’s other works, wheretranslingual exchange and exposure are constitutive rather than inciden-tal to the text.21 Drawing together international knowledge practices,Chaucer’s technical apparatus opens up transhemispheric horizons.

Chaucer’s Astrolabe depended for its existence on transcontinental textnetworks and scientific cultures from around the medieval Mediterra-nean. At the time, Latin and not English was still the default mediumof technical knowledge, and Chaucer’s efforts belong to the history ofthe slow vernacularization of textbook science. Aware of the contingen-cies involved, Chaucer speaks only of the limited sufficiency of his

19 See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. John H.Fisher (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1989), 909 nn. 60–61; Glending Olson, “Chaucer,” inThe Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2002), 566–88 (582–84); and Stephen Partridge, “ ‘Themakere of this boke’: Chaucer’s Retraction and the Author as Scribe and Compiler,” inAuthor, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice, ed. Partridge and ErikKwakkel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 106–53. On possible Wycliffiteassociations see Andrew Cole, “Chaucer’s English Lesson,” Speculum 77, no. 4 (2002):1128–67 (1142); and Ralph Hanna III, “The Difficulty of Ricardian Prose Translation:The Case of the Lollards,” MLQ 51 (1991), 319–40 (336–40). For reasons to doubt theattribution of a “Wycliffite” Bible see Henry Ansgar Kelly, The Middle English Bible: AReassessment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

20 Kathleen Biddick, Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadel-phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 23–33, proposes that the rationality andfalse universalism of the instrument served Christian supersessionism. She claims thatthe alphabet etched on the front border serves to “mechanize human diversity,” andinstantiates an ethnocentric orientation. As Catherine Eagleton shows, Biddick’s argu-ment is based on erroneous extrapolation from a limited sample, as Chaucer’s is the rarecase: “the vast majority of astrolabes do not have the alphabet on them” (CatherineEagleton, “ ‘Chaucer’s own astrolabe’: Text, Image and Object,” Studies in History andPhilosophy of Science Part A 38, no. 2 [2007], 303–26 [320]).

21 Jonathan Hsy, Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 57.

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English to accompany “a suffisant astrolabie as for oure orizonte com-powned after the latitude of Oxenforde” (7–9). In his prologue, Chauceradopts the pose of belated compiler: “I am but a lewde compilator ofthe labour of olde astrologiens and have it translatid in myn Englissheoonly for thy doctrine” (49–50). A sense of just how much the workof translation absorbed Chaucer in manifold disciplines, traditions, andtongues—what Stephen McCluskey calls medieval astronomies and sci-entific cultures in the plural—can only be suggested here.22 Specifically,Chaucer is adapting a Latin translation of a work attributed to theeighth-century Jewish-Arab astronomer Masha’allah ibn Atharı (Messa-hala), De compositione et operacione astrolabii. Chaucer also relays informationfrom the Tractatus de sphaera by the thirteenth-century Parisian scholarJohn Sacrobosco, whose treatise, a staple of the liberal arts curriculum,passed on a version of antique cosmology and spherical geometry. Howwas such a synthesis possible? The story begins with the abstract geomet-rical sophistication of Ptolemy’s Almagest, digested and developed intosophisticated planetary theory by scholars working around Baghdad,Maghrib, and al-Andalus from the eighth century onwards. Importantconduits to the Latin West included Gerbert of Aurillac in the late tenthcentury (who returned from northern Spain with the abacus and arabicnumerals) and, in the twelfth century, Adelard of Bath (translatingEuclid’s Elements and the tables of al-Kwarizmi, and composing an intro-duction to Abu Ma’Shar and a treatise On the Use of the Astrolabe). Theavailable texts and techniques engaged a circle of scholars working inthe West Midlands, where a keen interest in “Saracen calculation” tookhold.23 Growing familiarity with instruments (e.g., astrolabe, armillarysphere, and planetary equatorium) provoked the further spread of math-ematical and empirical methods. An “astronomical corpus” took shape.One example is London, British Library (BL), MS Harley 3647, afourteenth-century compilation from Paris, where Sacrobosco taught, con-taining Sacrobosco’s De sphaera, Masha’allah’s Astrolabium, Gerard ofCremona’s Theorica planetarum, Toledan Tabulae, and four astronomicaltreatises of Thabit ibn Qurra. Academic science was soon Englished in

22 Stephen McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Borrelli, Aspects of the Astrolabe, 66ff.

23 Charles Burnett, “Algorismi vel helcep decentior est diligentia: The Arithmetic of Ade-lard of Bath and His Circle,” in Mathematische Probleme im Mittelalter: Der lateinische undarabische Sprachbereich, ed. Menso Folkerts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996). Reprintedin Charles Burnett, Numerals and Arithmetic in the Middle Ages (Farnham: Ashgate,2010), 221–31.

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such compilations as Peterhouse, Cambridge, MS 75.1, which includes theunique copy of The Equatorie of the Planetis, and Trinity College, Cam-bridge, MS 0.5.26, whose matter includes Ptolemy, Alkabucius, Masha’al-lah, and The Newe Theorik of Planetis.24 In sum, Chaucer’s Astrolaberepresents a westering movement of multilingual scientific practices,where historical currents and countercurrents came to flow, blend, andpool in new vernaculars.

That scientific culture was on the move is everywhere evident inChaucer’s Astrolabe. What Chaucer had ahead of him to translate waspredicated on linguistic migration and cross-cultural exchange. Just so,his theory of translation appears rather encompassing: “suffise to thethese trewe conclusions in Englissh as wel as sufficith to these nobleclerkes Grekes these same conclusions in Grek; and to Arabiens in Ara-bik, and to Jewes in Ebrew, and to Latyn folk in Latyn; which Latynfolk had hem first out of othere diverse langages, and written hem inher owne tunge, that is to seyn, in Latyn” (23–29). He says English isas adequate as Greek, Arabic Hebrew, or Latin for translating “treweconclusions,” a view that is remarkable for refusing to exalt one oranother tongue.25 Whereas others would reassert linguistic hierarchies,Chaucer levels and historicizes them as local varietals. He had only toreflect on the fact that his English treatise is pervaded by a rich technicalvocabulary descending from regions between the Persian Gulf and the

24 For details about the development of an astronomy curriculum and defined corpussee Olaf Pedersen, “The Corpus Astronomicum and the Traditions of Medieval LatinAstronomy,” in Colloquia Copernicana III, ed. Owen Gingerich and Jerzy Dobrzycki(Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1975), 57–96; Olaf Pedersen, “The Origins of the ‘Theoricaplanetarum,’ ” Journal for the History of Astronomy 12 (1981): 113–23; and Lynn Thorn-dike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1949), 42–43. For a description of the contents of manuscripts see Kari Anne RandSchmidt, The Authorship of “The Equatorie of the Planetis,” 103–49, 186–282; and LinneR. Mooney, The Index of Middle English Prose: Handlist XI; Manuscripts in the Library ofTrinity College, Cambridge (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 109–21.

25 Compare the contemporaries John Trevisa, Thomas Usk, and Giles of Rome. Gilesargued that philosophers invented Latin in order better to communicate “the natures ofthings, the customs and men, and the course of the stars,” and would probably bristleat vernacular astronomy; cited and translated in T. Matthew N. McCabe, Gower’s VulgarTongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the “Confessio Amantis” (Cambridge: D. S.Brewer, 2011), 77. Usk is rather disingenuous given his own marvelous attempt torender science in the common tongue: “Let than clerkes endyten in Latyn, for they havethe propertie of science and the knowynge in that facultie; and lette Frenchmen in theirFrenche also endyten their queynt termes, for it is kyndely to their mouthes; and let usshewe our fantasyes in suche wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge.” See ThomasUsk, The Testament of Love, ed. R. Allen Shoaf (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publica-tions, 1998), Prol.23–27.

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North Atlantic. A barbarolexis of borrowed terms in astronomy (Arabicazimuth, almucantar, alidade, zenith, nadir; Greek horizon, planet, zodiac;Latin mater, latitude, umbra versa) is expressive of the profound intimacyof neighboring scientific cultures—Judaic, Christian, and Islamic. Chau-cer is also cognizant of his use of relatively uncommon Hindu-Arabicnumerals (“noumbres of augrym” [124, 126]), and affectionately, evenover-enthusiastically, attributes names of several months to “statutes oflordes Arabiens, somme by othre lordes of Rome” (130–31), since fewerof them are actually derived from the former.26 Chaucer defers to theMuslim forerunner “Alkabucius” (126) as much as to the Greek “Pto-lome” (228), and hews throughout to the lessons of the Jewish-ArabMasha’allah, his chief source. In translating science, Chaucer produceswhat Jenna Mead has called a “vernacular cosmology” alert to cross-cultural currents and energetic exchanges of language and learning onwhich astronomy depended.27 In its nomenclature alone, the ecolinguis-tic texture of the treatise would have been obvious. It is not just thatChaucer’s treatise avoids xenoglossia. Nor does he achieve merediglossia—a concept to which Tim William Machan appeals in describ-ing a general “ecology of Middle English”—according to which differentlanguages are socially stratified and allocated separate functions.28 Inthe linguistic ecology of Chaucer’s Astrolabe, language is rather morefinely reticulated, and the translator remains sensitive to ongoing multi-lingual exchanges and transcultural entanglements of the sciences.

If I am at pains to underline the ecumenical scope and significance ofthe translated matter, it is partly because Chaucer’s Astrolabe stands outagainst the monoculturalism of scientific publications today, the result

26 Copies of John Somer’s calendar include tables for converting roman numerals toarabic, indicating the unusual nature of the system, and English arithmetical treatisestypically begin with elementary numeration (describing the new figures, including thecipher, and place values). See Cornelius O’Boyle, “Astrology and Medicine in LaterMedieval England: The Calendars of John Somer and Nicholas of Lynn,” Sudhoffs Archiv89, no. 1 (2005): 1–22 (3–5); John Somer, The Kalendarium of John Somer, ed. Linne R.Mooney (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 35; Paul Acker, “The Craft ofNombrynge in Columbia University Library, Plimpton MS 259,” Manuscripta 37 (1993):71–83; and Robert Steele, ed., The Earliest Arithmetics in English, EETS e.s. 118 (London:H. Milford, 1922).

27 Jenna Mead, “Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe,” Literature Compass 3, no.5 (2006), 973–91 (985). Elsewhere, in “Reading by Said’s Lantern: Orientalism andChaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe,” Al-Masaq 15, no. 1 (2003), 77–82 (79), Jenna Meadwisely observes that the traces of a “textual genealogy” should prevent our taking thework as “an unmarked, white text.”

28 Tim William Machan, “The Ecology of Middle English,” in English in the MiddleAges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1–20.

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of the eventual passage from plural and polyglot disciplines to ones thatare now narrowly anglophone.29 It wasn’t always so. Chaucer’s scientificdiscourse models a cosmopolitan translatio studii, recollecting antecedenttranscultural exchanges and positioning the astrolabe within broad textnetworks. Part of what his treatise imagines into being is the interming-ling of cultures without antagonism or, at least, reflexive protectionism.In this respect, the Astrolabe should be put into relation to other effortsto “deprovincialize” and “decolonize” medieval knowledge practices, sit-uating the vernacular prose treatise within a more global Middle Ages.30

Yet the transmission of astronomical knowledge in language is only themost obvious example. Verbal translatio has a corollary in other sorts oftransformations specific to astrolabic science (mathematical, material,and metaphorical), suggesting that in both descriptive and functionalterms the instrument expands horizons.

Mathematics, Mobility, and Multi-Scalar Models

Among the necessary conditions of the natural sciences are texts andtechnical know-how, which are any serious practitioner’s pay for knowl-edge. Writing transforms matter into legible form. For Chaucer theworks of Ptolemy, Masha’allah, and Sacrobosco reproduce in some smallway what the Man of Law calls “thilke large book / Which that men

29 Michael D. Gordon, Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done before and after GlobalEnglish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

30 See Sharon Kinoshita’s “Deprovincializing the Middle Ages,” in The Worlding Proj-ect: Doing Culture Studies in the Era of Globalization, ed. Rob Wilson and ChristopherLeigh Connery (Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press, 2007), 61–75; John Dagenais and Mar-garet R. Greer, eds., Decolonizing the Middle Ages, special issue of JMEMSt 30, no. 3 (Fall2000); and the Global Middle Ages Project (GMAP), founded by Susan Noakes andGeraldine Heng, http://globalmiddleages.org (accessed March 24, 2018). Anticolonia-list science education is ongoing, on which see Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s “Decolonis-ing Science Reading List,” https://medium.com/@chanda/decolonising-science-reading-list-339fb773d51f (accessed April 20, 2017). For medieval cosmopolitanism see theessays in John M. Ganim and Shayne Aaron Legassie, eds., Cosmopolitanism in the MiddleAges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and in Kathryn L. Lynch, ed., Chaucer’sCultural Geography (New York: Routledge, 2002); and see the seminal essay of ElizabethSalter, “Chaucer and Internationalism,” SAC 2 (1980): 71–79. After I prepared myarticle for publication, there appeared a rich new essay by Christine Chism, “Transmit-ting the Astrolabe: Chaucer, Islamic Astronomy, and the Astrolabic Text,” in MedievalTextual Cultures: Agents of Transmission, Translation and Transformation, ed. Faith Wallisand Robert Wisnovsky (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 85–120, which works toward simi-lar conclusions about the ecumenical and cross-cultural astrolabe text.

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clepe the hevene ywriten . . . / With sterres.”31 The point could beunderstood in a practical, not esoteric, sense. The applications of theastrolabe require executing a series of actions and calculations describedin the treatise. But the techniques are not all textual. We can go onto specify nonverbal elements of the apparatus that enable translation,bringing the faraway nearby. Ancient and medieval scientific disciplinescounted on mental and mechanical components of an extended cogni-tive apparatus. Those resources include mathematical images and mate-rial media to render and rescale remote phenomena, accessing a cosmosaddressed to human capacities.

In an influential Aristotelian view, thought does not occur withoutimages.32 The basic assumption held for theoretical and practical disci-plines throughout the medieval period. Figures contemplated in themind, expressed in compass-and-line drawings, and embodied in physi-cal objects, reconstitute abstract quantities and aid comprehension. Itwas common practice to give visible shapes to mathematical propertiesin manuscripts, for instance by illustrating geometrical propositions inEuclid’s Elements or demonstrating theorems in al-Kwarizmi’s Algebra.33

Roger Bacon taught that number theory depends on such figures.34

Thomas Aquinas asserted that for angles, lines, points, and circles to

31 MLT, 190–93. This and all subsequent citations of Chaucer’s fictional works aredrawn from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston, Mass.:Houghton Mifflin, 1987), and appear in parentheses.

32 Aristotle, On Memory, 450a, and On the Soul, 1.1.403a, in The Complete Works ofAristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1984). For discussion see Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind:The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2009),380 and passim.

33 See standard drawings in Campanus of Novara’s version of Euclid (Paris, Biblio-theque nationale de France [BnF], MS Latin 16198, fols. 2–73) or Gerard of Cremona’stranslation of al-Kwarizmi (BnF, MS Latin 7377A, fols. 34–43, copied from BnF, MSLatin 9335, fols. 110–16). For a clear example of how squares are manipulated to solvequadratic equations see Robert of Chester’s Latin Translation of the Algebra of Al-Khowarizmi,ed. and trans. Louis Charles Karpinski (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 76–77.

34 Roger Bacon, The “Opus majus” of Roger Bacon, ed. John Henry Bridges, 3 vols.(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897–1900), Vol. 1, 4.1.3 (104): “Sed ratio numerorum afiguris dependent, quia numeri lineares, et superficiales, et corporales, et quadrati, etcubici, et pentagoni et hexagoni, et caeteri, a lineis et figuris et angulis cognoscuntur.”Translated by Robert Belle Burke in The “Opus majus” of Roger Bacon, Vol. 1 (New York:Russell and Russell, 1962), 122: “But the theory of number depends on figures, sincenumbers relating to lines, surfaces, solids, squares, cubes, pentagons, hexagons, andother figures, are known from lines, figures, and angles.” He would go on to argue that,in relation to scientiae experimentalis, mathematical proofs are the more certain whenaccompanied by drawn figures; see Bacon, Opus majus, ed. Bridges, Vol. 2, 6.1 (167).

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become intelligible they must be imagined.35 Closer to Chaucer’s time,Nicole Oresme would say that the parts and proportions of all thingsare so generated:

Mais tout continu ou magnitude est divisible par signacion en entendement enparties touzjours divisible, si come les astrologiens divisent les cercles du ciel endegrez, et les degrez en minuz, et les minuz en secons, et les secons en tiers, etpuis en quars, et puis en quins. Et ainsi puet l’en, par ymaginacion, procedersans cesser.

[But any continuum or magnitude is continually divisible conceptually in thehuman mind, as astrologers divide the heavens into degrees; the degrees intominutes; the minutes into seconds; the seconds into thirds, fourths, and thenfifths. The imagination can proceed thus endlessly.]36

Then, in his treatise on the sphere, Oresme begins with the idea that pointsand lines are not of nature, “in rerum natura,” but are of the imagina-tion, “sed solum fingitur per ymaginationem.”37 The verb he uses todescribe the process is a conjugation of fingo, whose range of meaningsinclude to form, frame, fashion, feign, and pretend, from which isderived the noun fictio for something fictional, fabricated, or invented.38

35 Ideas in mathematics are arrived at through “abstractio formae.” That geometrydeals in constructed images is evident from Thomas Aquinas, Expositio super librum Boe-thii De trinitate, ed. Bruno Decker (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1955), q. 5 a. 3, 17 (186) and q.6 a. 2, 20–26 (216); translated in Thomas Aquinas, The Division and Methods of theSciences: Questions V and VI of His Commentary on the “De trinitate” of Boethius, trans.Armand Maurer, 4th rev. ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986),41, 78. Cf. Armand Maurer, “Thomists and Thomas Aquinas on the Foundations ofMathematics,” Review of Metaphysics 47 (1993): 43–61.

36 He goes on, in Le livre du ciel et du monde, to say “[e]t est semblablement de touteschoses continues si come sont ligne, superfice, corps, movement, temps et teles choses”(and the same applies for all continuous things such as a line, a surface, a solid body,motion, time, and similar things); Nicole Oresme, Le livre du ciel et du monde, ed. AlbertD. Menut and Alexander J. Demony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968),I.1, 46–47.

37 Nicole Oresme, “The Questiones de sphera of Nicole Oresme,” ed. and trans. GarrettDroppers, Ph.D. diss. (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1966), 14–15, 310–11. Com-pare what he says about graphing intensive qualities and motions in another place:“Although indivisible points, or lines, are non-existent, still it is necessary to feign themmathematically for the measures of things and for the understanding of their ratios.”See Nicole Oresme, Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities and Motions: ATreatise on the Uniformity and Difformity of Intensities Known as “Tractatus de configurationibusqualitatum et motuum,” ed. and trans. Marshall Clagett (Madison: University of Wiscon-sin Press, 1968), 165.

38 Cf. John of Salisbury’s “figmenta rationis,” or conceptual fictions, employed byvarious branches of learning according to The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, trans. Daniel D. McGarry

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The resulting images are not exact abstract equalities, but they are func-tional figures for fixing times, locations, and motions; the same is trueof mathematical tables that enumerate “mean” motions of planets innumerical figures that adopt “the fiction that the heavenly bodies moveobligingly at even rates.”39 Astronomy consequently concerns neitherraw impressions nor pure ideas; it rather mediates between poles of per-ception and conception. Accordingly, Aquinas would speak of mathe-matical disciplines such as astronomy as scientia media, an intermediatescience, because they “apply mathematical principles to naturalthings.”40 Geometrical figures may be said to be one critical means bywhich theory can be mobilized and manipulated, so that models canbe devised and tested—issuing further conjectures based on abstractshapes.41

A practitioner can do many things per ymaginationem that cannot bedone just by fixing the gaze on the stars. But practical astronomy doesnot just thrive on mental images; it also embodies them within a sophis-ticated instrumentarium. A physical apparatus is necessary. As John ofHarlebeke wrote in a spirited prologue to Tractatus de sphera solida, aninfluential fourteenth-century work on the construction of a celestialglobe: “The root and basis of all astronomical theory, and also itsimmense prolixity and inexhaustible depth of ingenuity, take theirbeginning from things that are observed with appropriate instruments.It is agreed amongst all the authorities on this subject that without

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 135; and Ioannis Saresberiensis metalogi-con, ed. J. B. Hall and K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medi-aevalis 98 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1991), II.20 (96).

39 J. C. Eade, “ ‘We ben to lewed or to slowe’: Chaucer’s Astronomy and AudienceParticipation,” SAC 4 (1982): 53–85 (62).

40 Aquinas, The Division and Methods of the Sciences, 45.41 Thomas Aquinas, Nicole Oresme, and John Buridan explore the tolerances of

geocentrism, questioning the prevailing model. All recognized the provisionality ofastronomical speculations, which were based in the observation and geometricization ofexternal phenomena. See Thomas Aquinas, In libros Aristotelis De caelo et mundo, De gener-atione et corruptione, Metereologicorum expositio, ed. R. M. Spiazzi (Turin: Marietti, 1952),Vol. 2, Lecture 17; Oresme, Le livre du ciel et du monde, 514–39; and John Buridan,Johannis Buridani: Questiones super libris quattuor De caelo et mundo, ed. Ernest AddisonMoody (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1942), Vol. 2, 1.22, 227.The latter two are excerpted in Richard C. Dales, ed., The Scientific Achievement of theMiddle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973), 129, 135. Christianthinkers arrived late in a line of Muslim and Jewish cosmologists who debated thetenability of circular and eccentric motions of the universe, on which see Bernard R.Goldstein, “The Status of Models in Ancient and Medieval Astronomy,” Centaurus 24(1980): 132–47.

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instruments there would be no way of discovering the motions of thecelestial bodies.”42 A manual apparatus such as a metal astrolabe, equa-torium, navicula, globe, albion, or rectangulus lends material form andfunction to abstract quantities, as to some extent do manuscript vol-velles modeled on mathematical instruments.43 Chaucer’s Astrolabeshares conventional assumptions about the cognitive convenience ofsuch geometrical figures. Here they are delineated in a transmedialdevice, still the abstract product of imagination but now concretized ina manufactured object. A scientia media takes a particular medium. Forexample, the pin going through the center of the astrolabe, holding allthe parts together, is “ymagyned to be the pool artic in thyn astralabie”(199–200). Readers are likewise referred to the simulacral lines of thezodiac (“the zodiac in hevene is ymagyned to ben a superficie contenyga latitude of 12 degrees” [323–25]), the ecliptic (“Amiddes this celestialzodiak is ymagined a lyne whiche that is clepid the ecliptik lyne, underwhiche lyne is evermo the weye of the sonne” [327–29]), and the merid-ian (“Thys lyne meridional is but a manere descripcioun of a lyne ymag-ined that passith upon the poles of this world and by the cenyth of oureheved” [1209–11]). An experienced practitioner, Chaucer understandsthat such artifacts of geometry are approximate: e.g., a margin of errormust be accepted, especially when the zodiac circle on the rete nearlyaligns with almucantars during midday, making it hard to read off coor-dinates (458ff.). And yet the treatise works on the assumption that the

42 Translated in Richard Lorch, “The sphera solida and related instruments,” Centaurus24 (1980), 155–56, based on his reading of two manuscripts and an early print version.For the Latin see Sphera mundi noviter recognita cum commentariis et authoribus in hoc voluminecontentis videlicet (Venice: Giunta, 1518), Universal Short Title Catalogue 854129, fol.139v: “Totius astrologie speculationis radix et fundamentum eius quoq[ue] prolixitatisimmensitas subtilitatisq[ue] inexhausta profunditas ex hiis que per visum percepta suntnon sine sibi congruis instrumentis supersit exordium. Certu[m] nanq[ue] apud omneshuius discipline professores habetur instr[umentis] astrolo[gie] motus celesti circuli[s]corporumq[ue] celestium cognoscendi viam.” The treatise survives in over thirty manu-scripts and three sixteenth-century imprints; see the bibliography in Lynn Thorndikeand Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1963), 1576. For a discussion of author-ship and the content of the treatise see Kathrin Chlench, “ ‘Sphera solida’: A Treatiseon the Celestial Globe and Its Significance in Late Medieval Astronomy,” Globe Studies57/58 (2011): 70–80; and Elly Dekker, Illustrating the Phaenomena: Celestial Cartographyin Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 341–43.

43 Astrolabe volvelles are found, for instance, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ash-mole 391 and MS Ashmole 369; and in BL, MS Egerton 848. See further Laurel Bras-well-Means, “The Vulnerabilty of Volvelles in Manuscript Codices,” Manuscripta 35(1991): 43–54.

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designed object constitutes a sufficient medium for tracking celestialmovements and magnitudes because it usefully geometricizes them. Anastrolabe instrumentalizes an artificial pattern—which is to say, it fic-tionalizes parts of the universe in an eminently pragmatic way—forminga useable interface to mediate between individual and environment.Ambient celestial phenomena (horizon, meridian, zenith, latitudes, starpositions, and so on) can now be reckoned and rendered legible andnegotiable. Locations and motions can be compiled and arranged forconvenience—effectively picturing them. An amateur will not immedi-ately spot the outline of the heavens, though a proportional diagram ofthe sky above the horizon of an observer is actually inscribed on thefront surface. It takes the effort of exercising what Borrelli calls the“geometrical imagination” to see how coordinates are projected ontothe plane in a way that maintains symmetry between astrolabe and en-vironment.44

Specifically, it is by means of stereographic projection that astronomi-cal phenomena are made to inhere in an astrolabe’s physical shape. Aprojection occurs in obtaining points, lines, and angles from curvilinearspace and three-dimensional objects and tracing them in scaled-downquantities against a flat ground.45 An astrolabe takes selected featuresof the hemispheric vault and maps them onto a small surface thereby,graphically distributing coordinates on the metal plate. The transforma-tion is more sophisticated than elementary varieties in plane geometry,where figures merely turn (rotation), flip (reflection), or slide (transla-tion), producing isometry. With no loss of properties, such angular fig-ures are visibly congruent, conforming to Euclid’s fourth postulate (i.e.,all right angles are equal).46 Rather, stereographic projection ratherresults in area distortion. Circles are not all symmetrical; spaces are notequal. As Chaucer says of almucantars, “somme of hem semen parfitcercles and somme inparfit” (269–70). Nonetheless, invariant mathe-matical properties are retained in the proportions of lines and shapes.Another challenge is posed by the fact that the astrolabe intercalates

44 Borrelli, Aspects of the Astrolabe, 47.45 Helpfully diagrammed in North, Chaucer’s Universe, Fig. 5.46 Those mirroring effects are treasured attributes in later medieval art and architec-

ture (e.g., in symmetrical wings of buildings, rosettes in church windows, and diaperingpatterns in painting), as discussed in the third chapter of Felipe Cucker, Manifold Mir-rors: The Crossing Paths of the Arts and Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2013).

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three coordinate systems and projects them one upon the other.47 Thefirst is oriented around the local latitude of a terrestrial observer (Oxfordin the case of Chaucer’s Astrolabe), so that the metal plate shows a projec-tion of a portion of the sky over the northern hemisphere, subdividedby intersecting lines spreading at constant intervals from horizon tozenith: that is, lines of concentric almucantars (circles of equal altitude)and of radiating azimuths (directions). A second, independent systeminscribed on the same plate is centered not on the Oxonian observer buton the celestial North Pole. Nested circles trace the two tropics and theequator; lines of the compass run from side to side and top to bottom;a hole in the center marks the pole. A third coordinate system is indi-cated by the moveable rete sitting atop the plate, showing the visiblestars and ecliptic circle (which indicates the course of the sun and thezodiac band), forming a fretwork rotating on the polar axis. Wheneverything is assembled in a handy device complete with figures andscales on the border, the result is a compact but apparently lopsidedinterface. An astrolabe appears askew because some lines and circles arecentered on local latitude (zenith), others on the pole, while the eclipticis eccentric to both and also revolves. The total effect of mapping of thecelestial vault is a dense meshwork for which, as we will see, Chaucerhas recourse to metaphorical figures. In any case, the astrolabe presentsa functional interface that formalizes, rescales, and overlays informationfrom the various sources. To observers whose universe appears to rotatearound the earth, the sun and moon progress in succession along similarpaths; other planets travel at different speeds along individual routes;and the constellations of the zodiac rotate at a different pace. The astro-labe is a mimetic and manipulable medium that superposes the variouscoordinates on the face of the mechanism. The device configures a per-ception of formal regularity thereby, wrested from the cosmic kinemat-ics of eccentric motions; it rationalizes and miniaturizes the machinamundi, a Lucretian phrase Sacrobosco adapts to refer to the instrument,manifesting a cosmic geometry.48

Practical astronomy consequently yields a sense of translation to com-plement others: referring now neither to textual transmission nor to an

47 See Glen Van Brummelen, The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth: The EarlyHistory of Trigonometry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1–8.

48 See Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Sciences, 8 vols., Vol. 3(New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 405, and his edition of The “Sphere” ofSacrobosco and Its Commentators (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 78, 119;and Borrelli, Aspects of the Astrolabe, 160–61.

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attendant transferral of cosmopolitan culture but to the transposition ofspatiotemporal dimensions. An astrolabe is an inscriptive and calculativemedium that enables information extraction, conversion, and displaybecause of the kind of figures it makes of remote phenomena. Its aimis to obtain reliable and replicable results across distances, registeringcorrespondence where none was obvious, furnishing further evidence ofthe decolonizing potential of the scientific practice. Applying a universalgeometry, holding basic values constant across space and time, theastrolabe amounts to a technological and transcultural idealization ofa common world. In a sense, the mechanism is the message. It is afigment of the device to cultivate a sense of place that is eco-cosmopolitan.49 Chaucer is alive to the implications, which he couldhardly avoid in devotion to such a well-traveled scientific apparatus.Such instruments are oriented outward, encouraging a peripatetic intel-ligence and instantiating a shared topology through a kind of mathe-matical abstraction. Chaucer goes through a series of exercises onhypothetical projections in foreign lands, using geometrical devices asvehicles. Conclusions 23–25 provide instructions in how to “prove evi-dently the latitude of any place in a regioun” (239). Conclusion 26describes how an equatorial astrolabe would have to possess almucantars“streight as a lyne” (943–44). Moreover, the calendars he intended forthe third part were devoted to value conversion, assuming the commen-surability of number across cultural boundaries.50 Number, interval, andratio here constitute the rare phenomena of providing shared groundsfor otherwise diverse polities—as if to suggest cultural forms at theirmost numerocentric could be the less ethnocentric. Further, the astro-labe is an object designed to travel. Portable devices such as Chaucer’s(“so small an instrument portatif” [58]) could contain nested plates forseveral regions: the so-called Chaucer Astrolabe at the British Museumcovers nearly 20 latitude and includes plates for Oxford, Paris, Montpel-lier, Rome, Jerusalem, and Babylon; others might range from 23 to 48,from roughly Lower Egypt to northern France.51 As a mathematico-material conveyance, the astrolabe may be said to exemplify the aston-ishing mobility that Brian Rotman has in mind when observing that

49 The eco-inflected terminology is that of Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense ofPlanet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2008), 61.

50 See Somer, Kalendarium, ed. Mooney, 3. For an overview of the matter see JoseChabas, “Characteristics and Typologies of Medieval Astronomical Tables,” Journal of theHistory of Astronomy 43 (2012): 269–86.

51 See Epact, 40428; and Ward, A Catalogue, 110–13.

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“one does mathematics by propelling an imago—an idealized version ofoneself . . . around an imagined landscape of signs.”52 An astrolabe real-izes in form and function the overlooked adjacency of localities and poli-ties, horizontalizing and miniaturizing vast territories. It is as if theastrolabic projection, mathematizing and mapping the cosmos, antici-pates Latourian flattened ontology. An astrolabe is not unlike a one-dimensional trail map whose coordinates “maintain intact a certain num-ber of geometrical liaisons, appropriately called constants.” Despite “totaldissimilarity” between map and territory, one corresponds to the other.53

Mediation and Technoscientific Hybrids

Chaucer’s Astrolabe attests to the manner in which astronomy obtainsfacts by deploying transmedial designs. The technical configuration oftransmissible matter is not incidental but constitutive of a rational astro-labic science. As Johanna Drucker observes in general: “Data arecapta.”54 The astrolabe makes the process of data capture and conversionparticularly conspicuous to practice (“the taking of stars,” acceptio stel-larum, is the root sense of astrolabe according to Masha’allah), revealingthe extent to which practitioners rely on effective media. Astronomy onthis view is an attribute of a translatory mechanism; that is, an astrolabeelicits knowledge practices that are to some extent articulated andembodied in it. Perhaps because information is encoded in such intricateand eloquent detail in the arabesque body of the instrument, the astro-labe can seem nearly animate. At least the astrolabe generates otherkinds of thought than the purely spatiotemporal, and it is to theseimplications that the essay will turn to show how the expressive designlends itself to a nearly literary mimesis in and beyond Chaucer’s Astro-labe. Producing surprising yet captivating figures of speech, the sciencemay now be said to take a turn toward irrational anthropomorphic andzoomorphic figures—except that they have their own rationale. The

52 Brian Rotman, Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Palo Alto: Stan-ford University Press, 2000), 51.

53 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns,trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 76. Onflat ontology and topology see also Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introductionto Actor-Network-Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and ManuelDeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 51.

54 Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 128.

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competence of the technical object is adumbrated by chimerical meta-phors that underscore co-adaptive processes and situated knowledgepractices.

Several such devices appear in the first part of Chaucer’s Astrolabe,devoted to what he calls “the figures and the membres of thyn astrola-bie” (53–54). Translating for an amateur, Chaucer first speaks of thecircular body of the instrument hollowed out on one side as the “moder”(Fig. 1). The recessed interior is said to be “perced with a large hool thatreceiveth in hir wombe the thynne plates compowned for diverse cly-mate” (96–97). Various lines, numbers, letters, and names includingfigures on the front (the “wombe side” [207]) produce the appearanceof “the werke of a wommans calle” (285)—a term that refers to a hair-net but could also apply to the reticulated membrane of an egg or inter-nal organ.55 Chaucer did not invent these evocative descriptions, theEnglish “moder” for instance having descended from Latin mater andArabic al umm as more like a collective enunciation of earlier technics.56

The concept is conveyed in and through multilingual corpora, and assuch, the improbable anatomical metaphor is more evidence of transla-tion. As a figurative device, metaphor is itself something that migratesacross distinct domains, as rhetorical handbooks from Quintilian toGeoffrey of Vinsauf onward taught: a form of translatio that bears andconveys sense from one place to another.57 A standard grammaticaldefinition derived from Donatus imagined metaphorical figures as cross-ing customary ontological limits, from animate to inanimate and backagain.58 They produce strange hybrids. In her analysis of the medieval

55 MED, s.v. calle.56 It is a weird conceit with a long history. Everything from Plato’s primordial chora

to the motherboard of computers today suggests that the matrix exerts a strong gripon the techno-scientific imagination. Talk of promiscuous and monogamous networks,male and female connectors, and associated technological capacities as a “matrix, awomb, the mother-matter that spawns us all” persist in computational vocabularies; seeErik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York:Harmony Books, 1998), 326; and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Habitual New Media:Exposing Empowerment,” Barnard College in New York City, October 10, 2013,https://vimeo.com/78287998 (accessed August 29, 2016).

57 On metaphorical transfer see Pseudo-Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium: Cicero Vol. 1,trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library 403 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1954), 342 (4.21); Quintilian, Institutio oratoria: The Orator’s Education, Volume I:Books 1–2, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library 124 (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 303–11 (8.6); and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetrianova, trans. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010),43–44.

58 Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical Text (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 125; Martin Irvine, Making of Textual Cul-

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rhetoric of female embodiment, Jill Ross suggests that metaphor per-forms “a paradigmatic maternal function of incarnating the invisible inthe form of discourse.”59 She follows Boncompagno da Signa’s thirteenth-century description of metaphor itself as the “mother of all ornament,”activating the figure in the very definition of rhetorical figuration.60

The allusive troping of technology at once evokes an organic repro-ductive space and inorganic interface; it renders the material design ofthe instrument a vital matrix. Here the “moder” enlivens even as itestranges the scientific object by pointing beyond persons toward inter-relations that precede human practices. In the immediate context,Chaucer’s Astrolabe is directed at the education of little Lewis, presentingthe boy with a sophisticated learning apparatus, linking technology withpedagogy and beyond that children’s nurture, so that it can be taken totell a story about the dependency of living processes on surrogate mat-ter. Adapted to the capabilities of a young amateur, Chaucer’s treatiserepresents a variety of children’s literature that trains up the intellectand engages affect, appealing to the curiosity of a child and expressingcare for his development. The occasion is reminiscent of one earlier com-position, a treatise on the astrolabe Adelard composed for a youngHenry Plantagenet.61 The idea that a child could be fostered on naturalsciences is not a fanciful modern conceit. Four known manuscripts giveChaucer’s Astrolabe the vivid title “Brede and Milke for Children,” iden-tifying the stimulating matter of the treatise with digestible foodstuffsand nursing (Fig. 2). Anthropomorphized features of the apparatuswould then reinforce the connection to natality and early nurture, aswould traditional identifications among geography, cosmology, andanatomy in the later medieval period.62

ture: “Grammatica” and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994), 228–29. Examples of the four ways of metaphor (translatio) are given inQuintilian, Institutio oratoria, 305–7 (8.6).

59 Jill Ross, Figuring the Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval His-panic Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 23; Peter Dronke, Danteand Medieval Latin Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 17.

60 Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica novissima, ed. Augusto Gaudenzi, in Bibliothecaiuridica medii aevi: Scripta anecdota glossatorum, Vol. 2 (Bologne: Piero Virano, 1892), 281:“Transumptio est mater omnium adornationum.” Cited in Ross, Figuring the Feminine,23; and Dronke, Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions, 17.

61 BL, MS Arundel 377. See Charles Homer Haskins, “Adelard of Bath and HenryPlantagenet,” EHR 28 (1913): 515–16; and Charles Burnett, The Introduction of ArabicLearning into England (London: British Library, 1997), 31–69.

62 An association of world and womb should have been familiar enough at the time.For some the earth, nested in the center of a Ptolemaic universe, was a great egg. Thinkalso of the Pardoner’s Old Man’s knocking on the earth he calls “mother,” denoting the

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What else such archaic figures may imply for the science has occa-sioned some debate, though the implications have not been pursuedvery far. On the one hand, quasi-animate terms may facilitate a sense ofbelonging within an intellectual lineage, following Seth Lerer’s viewthat Chaucer’s Astrolabe exhibits a conspicuous genealogical cast: it situ-ates the son Lewis in relation to a familiar faith and fatherland.63 Passeddown the family line, the work is construed as part of an antique andmedieval tradition of intellectual and national paternalism that occludesfemale involvement. The labor of paternal authorship over source mate-rial generates a seminal work in translation, evoking a hylomorphic the-ory of reproduction.64 On the other hand, the mother in the machinecan produce some resistance to generic masculine authority. As JennaMead argues, “the resonance of the instrument’s outer plate (‘moder’)maintains a powerful allure so that we should probably consider alterna-tive constructions of authorship implied by the trope.” Following DerekPearsall among others who surmise that Lewis was the illegitimate off-spring of Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne, Mead suggests the treatisemay “bear the hint of confession.”65 It would be a veiled and attenuatedconfessional gesture but one that takes the technical metaphor seriously,in this case unmasking a sordid and evidently criminal act.

The analyses so far foreground interpersonal intrigues at the expenseof other, no less vital impersonal agencies and complicating attributes

very ground measured by a device such as an astrolabe. For other associations one recallsthat Rome radiated from a sacred site known as the umbilicus Romae, and other citieswere likened to bodies with similar symbolic cities, on which see Richard Sennett, Fleshand Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton,1996); and Keith D. Lilley, City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2009).

63 Seth Lerer, “Chaucer’s Sons,” UTQ 73, no. 3 (2004): 901–16 (909).64 Cf. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1990); A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1985), 92; Glenn Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 160; and Louise M. Bishop, “Father Chaucer andthe Vivification of Print,” JEGP 106, no. 3 (2007): 336–63. A product of a HocclevianFather Chaucer (“O, vniuersel fadir in science!,” as per Regiment of Princes), Chaucer’streatise would perpetrate a presumptive heteronormative order.

65 Mead, “Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe,” 980. Cf. Derek Pearsall, TheLife of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 137–38: “It hasoften been conjectured that there may be a child hidden away too, and that ‘little Lewis,’the 10-year-old son to whom Chaucer dedicated the Treatise on the Astrolabe in 1391,was the product of the union with Cecily, but the evidence is merely circumstantial.”On the charge against Chaucer of raptus and his subsequent release, see ChristopherCannon, “Raptus in the Chaumpaigne Release and a Newly Discovered Document Con-cerning the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Speculum 68, no. 1 (1993): 74–94.

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Fig. 1. Front of an astrolabe as depicted in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e. Mus. 54,fol. 2v, labeling “Riet” and “moder” and showing zoomorphic star pointers. Chaucer’stext above the diagram runs: “The moder of thin asterlabie is thikkeste plate percedwith a large hole that resseyuyth in hir wombe the thynne plates compowned for diuerseclymates and thi Riet shapen in manere of a net or of a web of a loppe.” With thanksto the Bodleian Library.

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Fig. 2. Alternative title “Bred and mylk ffor chylderen” at the head of Chaucer’s Treatiseon the Astrolabe in Bodleian Library, MS e. Mus. 54, fol. 1. With thanks to the BodleianLibrary.

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of the sciences. Developing a feeling for what Jane Bennett calls a“touch of anthropomorphism,”66 we may also sense ways in which themother in the machine is able to deepen the historical analysis. Chau-cer’s astrolabe comes at the end of a long selection process that hastaken place, quite without his involvement, in a fecund milieu. Hisdebts to both culture and nature are evident. From a functional stand-point, the instrument is a pregnant matrix in which past technics arebrought into the present. Affiliations among scientific cultures andactors are manifest, as previously noted, just in the mathematical geom-etry. Taking in much longer scales of development, the metal body ofthe instrument is proof of co-adaptive interactions of entities and envi-ronments. Made from mineral substance—coming from what medievalwriters would also figure as a gravid mother—the astrolabe is embeddedin earth’s history.67 Alert to what a metaphor carries and delivers, suchinsistent figures may work to confound distinctions between animateand inanimate, person and thing, positing a dynamic and diffuse mor-phogenesis. The metallic substrate is allusive of Manuel DeLanda’s “geo-logical history” or Jussi Parikka’s “mineral durations”—terms thatdescribe the planetary scales and substance of media technology to sug-gest that devices present matter that ultimately predates humans.68 Tar-rying with a meager metaphor, then, we find in the matrix a repudiationof a single, virile source. Here there can be no hylomorphic presumption

66 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 98–99. For a defense of the critical possibilities of anthro-pomorphism see Tom Tyler, Ciferae: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 2012), 51–64.

67 See, for example, Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wyckoff(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 169, 196. For an analysis of rock as the matrix ofmetal in Albertus, see Valerie Allen, “Mineral Virtue,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral:Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington: Oliphaunt Books, 2012),123–52 (133ff.). Her explanation of how metaphors matter to science is fitting: “Justas there can come a point when a scientific model so aptly illustrates its phenomenathat it steps out of the realm of metaphor to describe rather than fictionalize thosephenomena, so the reproductive model stops analogizing and starts describing” (140).

68 Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Cambridge, Mass.: MITPress, 1997); Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,2015), 4. Such elemental vitality is akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s “machinic phylum,”where metals themselves are seen as generating assemblages. See Gilles Deleuze andFelix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980),409; and see Manuel DeLanda, “Nonorganic Life,” in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Craryand Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 135–36, and Manuel DeLanda, “TheMachinic Phylum,” in TechnoMorphica, ed. Joke Brouwer and Carla Hoekendijk (Rotter-dam: V2_publishing, 1997), consulted in an online version without pagination at http://v2.nl/archive/articles/the-machinic-phylum (accessed August 1, 2016).

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of masculine mastery; there are plural points of origin.69 A scientificcorpus is the result of so many intersecting, epigenetic lines that are notreducible to an author. It is from this perspective that the writer’s pleaof unoriginality (“I ne usurpe not to have foundenn this werke of mylabour or of myn engyn,” 48–49) should be heard as a strong disavowalof any notion of a lone progenitor. The terminology can evoke technicaland sexual propagation.70 Accounting for his derivative work, Chaucerstands in a relation of surrogacy to sources of the science and technology.Considering the various geo-social matrixes in which he is absorbed inthe treatise, Chaucer is rather like an episode in the life-cycle of theapparatus, which in Gilbert Simondon’s view is how technical objectsengender modes of existence. Technical life is always “transindividual.”71

By now the strain of “mother” and “womb” has surely been felt.Referring to a metal disc by an anatomical metaphor is odd and distort-ing, coaxing an awareness of the artificial construct as assemblage. Butit is not the only animating figure. Alert to the weblike formations ofastrolabe plate and rete, Chaucer follows his sources again in speakingof parts of the instrument as evocatively spiderlike: the azimuth lines onthe plate form “a maner croked strikes like to the clawes of a loppe[spider]” (276), and twice the rete is said to be “shapen in manere of anett or of a lopwebbe after the olde descripicioun” (297, 299), recallingthe traditional names of the components in Arabic (ankabut) and Latin(aranea). It is imagery that has proven as sticky as a cobweb (Fig. 3).Ptolemy’s Planisphaerium, a first-century treatise on the flattening of thesphere that survives only in Arabic, refers to part of one horary instru-ment as a “spider.”72 Vitruvius mentions astronomical inventions hecalls arachne and conarachne, which seem to refer to flat and conical sun-dials that are ancestors of the astrolabe.73 As far back as the fourth

69 On competing models of reproduction in the period see J. Allan Mitchell, BecomingHuman: The Matter of the Medieval Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,2014), 9ff.

70 Middle English engyn—skill or ingenuity—has origins in Latin gignere—to beget—producing words that are close cousins, such as genital and progeny. Cf. Ingham, TheMedieval New, 86.

71 Simondon, The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 72–74, 58, 252–53.72 Nathan Sidoli and J. L. Berggren, “The Arabic Version of Ptolemy’s Planisphere or

Flattening the Surface of the Sphere: Text, Translation, Commentary,” SCIAMVS 8 (2007):37–139 (126).

73 See Dekker, Illustrating the Phaenomena, 27; Jerome Bonnin, “Conarachne et Peleci-num: About Some Graeco-Roman Sundial Types,” British Sundial Society Bulletin 27(2015): 28–32; and, for a possible reconstruction of the arachne, Erkka Maula, “TheSpider in the Sphere: Eudoxus’ Arachne,” Philosophia 5–6 (1975–76): 225–57.

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Fig. 3. Diagram of an astrolabe plate showing spiderlike azimuths (direction), zenith,pole, tropics, horizon, and hours. Bodleian Library, MS e. Mus. 54, fol. 8v. With thanksto the Bodleian Library.

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century bce Eudoxus was supposed to have come up with a “geometri-cal spider” consisting of what appears to be a model of the heavens inthe form of intersecting lines arrayed on a plane or bowl. The imagemay extend to astronomical tables Chaucer had meant to include: thesewere once called zij, deriving from Persian for “threads” or “chords,”associated in early etymology with textile-making and coming later todescribe intertwined rows and columns of data.74

Spider and thread metaphors, crude though they may appear, serveas shorthand for complex material supports and tactics of the sciences.They also introduce more unexpected affiliations. Chaucer’s “loppe” isno biblical spider—a negative exemplum of the wicked who entrap theinnocent (Isaiah 59)—but instead conjures the figure of natural indus-try, practical intelligence, attentiveness, and good nurture set forth inthe medieval bestiaries and encyclopedias.75 It is notable that the preg-nant spider can serve to reinforce the link between reproductivity andinstrumentality. Albertus Magnus observes that spiders make webs intowombs, laying eggs in a kind of external uterus.76 Bartholomaeus Angli-cus says that one of the wonders of the spider is that she contains suffi-cient matter in her womb to spin a great web.77 The spider is more oftenesteemed for its geometrical sophistication—an ability to join a web atregular intervals and right angles, distributing lines “yliche ferre fro 3emyddel poynt.”78 The spider makes and maintains artificial structuresand abstract figures, and even, as Pliny observed, deploys its body as acontrolling plumb bob.79 Aristotle, Philo of Alexandria, and Seneca allremarked the spider’s knack for architectural designs; Ovid associates

74 J. D. North, Cosmos: An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2008), 192.

75 See, for instance, evidence discussed in E. Ruth Harvey, “The Swallow’s Nest andSpider’s Web,” in Studies in English Language and Literature: “Doubt Wisely” (Papers inHonour of E. G. Stanley) (London: Routledge, 1996), 327–41 (332–33).

76 Albertus Magnus, De animalibus libri XXVI, ed. Hermann Stadler, 2 vols. (Mun-ster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1916–20), Vol. 1, lib. VIII, tract. 4, cap.1 (629); Vol. 2, lib. XXVI (1582); Albertus Magnus, On Animals: A Medieval SummaZoologica, trans. Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick, 2 vols. (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Vol. 1, 8.4 (729); Vol. 2, 26 (1744).

77 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of “Deproprietatibus rerum” of Bartholomaeus Anglicus: A Critical Text, Vol. 2, ed. M. C. Seymour(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975–88), 1139 (18.11).

78 Ibid.79 Pliny, Natural History, Vol. 3, Books 8–11, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical

Library 353 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940), 481–83 (11.28).

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the spider with arts and crafts.80 The spider—like the bee who fabricateshexagonal cells—possesses such formidable intelligence and instru-ments, unaided by human learning, that it could pose a challenge tohuman exceptionalism.81 Moreover, the spider thwarts assumed genderhierarchies insofar as it was thought that the female, generating fila-ment from within her body, is the preeminent worker and provider.Albertus Magnus observes that as the evident doyenne she has greateradvantage and independence as compared to the male whom she sexu-ally dominates.82 In sum, the feminized spider is a natural observerwhose model the sciences belatedly and laboriously follow. She is like anapparitional image of the skillful and well-equipped technician. Hers isthe matrix in which human instrumentation is raveled because she pos-sesses the original instrumenta.83

Spiderlikeness has long been a summons to distribute sentience andskill across a multispecies spectrum.84 In particular, the spider realizes atechnoscientific ideal according to which one is not just observing anenvironment but setting out threads through which things becomegrasped. Radiating lines, chords, angles, ligatures, and so on constitutea tissue of mimetic relations. Jakob von Uexkull’s account of the spider-web’s correlation with the “image of the fly” is an instructive analogue:

80 Katarzyna Michalski and Sergiusz Michalski, Spider (London: Reaktion, 2010),58–64.

81 As suggested by Harvey in “The Swallow’s Nest and Spider’s Web,” 334: “whenadmirers of the cobweb start to talk about geometry they are getting dangerously nearthe liberal arts, those skills proper to man.”

82 See Albertus Magnus, On Animals, Vol. 1, 4.4 (486); Vol. 2, 8.4 (728); Vol. 2, 26(1744); and for the Latin see Albertus Magnus, De animalibus, Vol. 1, lib. IV, tract. 2,cap. 4 (405); Vol. 1, lib. VIII, tract. 4, cap. 1 (629); Vol. 2, lib. XXVI (1582–83).

83 On her instrumenta venandi, or hunting implements, see Albertus Magnus, De ani-malibus libri, Vol. 2, lib. XXVI (1579); Albertus Magnus, On Animals, Vol. 2, 21.8(1740).

84 It is not the only place spiderlikeness is arrogated to the human. Roger Bacondiscusses the aranea and retina (net) of the eye, as noted in Suzanne Conklin Akbari,Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2004), 94. Heraclitus of Ephesus (as reported in the twelfth century) andChrysippus (through Calcidius) compared the soul to a spider whose web extendsthrough the human sensorium, on which see Michalski and Michalski, Spider, 64–65;Heraclitus, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, ed. Charles H. Kahn (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1979), 289; Josiah B. Gould, The Philosophy of Chrysippus(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970), 129–30; Michael Frampton,Embodiments of Will: Anatomical and Physiological Theories of Voluntary Animal Motions fromGreek Antiquity to the Latin Middle Ages, 400 BC–AD 1300 (Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag,2008), 227.

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“the body structure of the spider has taken on certain of the fly’s charac-teristics,” which the web expresses and captures in a complex tracery.85

The interwoven result is not mental so much as filamental. Still moresuggestive is the account of pragmatic experience in Tim Ingold’s SPI-DER (an acronym for “Skilled Practice Involves DevelopmentallyEmbodied Responsiveness”). Practice relies on a flexible webwork, a setof relays enabling agile receptivity rather than mere representation.86

The way things are threaded through each other takes us beyond a staticfly-image to elucidate what might be dynamically transmitted by meansof material affiliations. It is what ingenious figurative devices (whethercobwebs, mechanical retes, or metaphors) continually do by crossingspecies and substances.87 The spider crops up repeatedly to suggest usersare always caught, situated, and entangled. Are we to think prac-titioners become arachnoid? At least the astrolabe is an apparatus thatintensifies human sentience and skill by arithmetical, alphabetical,visual, and haptic means, effectively producing variation on what AndyClark calls the “mind–body scaffolding.”88 Planetary phenomenaachieve nucleated form in a virtual organ, an external object that distrib-utes cognition and corporal experience beyond the space of a naturalbody.

A figurative spiderweb, womb, or woman’s hairnet is a minor conceitthat may seem easy to dismiss in Chaucer’s Astrolabe. Yet seeminglytrivial and amusing turns of phrase configure perceptions of the ap-paratus; tangential figures introduce alternative angles of view on

85 Jakob von Uexkull, “The Theory of Meaning,” Semiotica 42, no. 1 (1982): 25–82(42, 66).

86 Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London:Routledge, 2011), 91. Ingold’s SPIDER does not embody quite the same methodologyas Latour’s ANT (Actor Network Theory). As SPIDER says to ANT in a playful collo-quy, the web is dynamic: “They are the lines along which I live, and conduct my percep-tion and action in the world. For example, I know when a fly has landed in the webbecause I can feel the vibrations in the lines through my spindly legs, and it is alongthese same lines that I run to retrieve it.”

87 Cf. Jussi Parikka’s account of what he calls “insect media”: prevailing buggy meta-phors convey ultramodern notions that technoculture is on a continuum with “technicsof nature.” Accordingly, “the issue of categorical difference between animals andhumans, nature and technology is bracketed and the view of affects, movements, andrelations among parts is posited as primary.” See Parikka, Insect Media, 72.

88 Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intel-ligence (Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press Canada, 2004), 11 et passim; and com-pare the notion of the “alphabetic body” in Brian Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves: TheAlphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,2008), 13ff.

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instrumentality. While they obviously fail to reach the heights of sophis-tication achieved by mathematical geometry and planetary theory, suchfigments evince something of Jack Halberstam’s “low theory.”89 InChaucer’s treatise such meager fictions of science capture additionalinformation by metaphorical transformation, returning technical matterto language in an unexpected manner. The metaphorics function to cre-ate splayed networks, producing otherwise unlikely associations amongspecies. Other figures that might be considered include the wedge-likepin that goes through the middle and cinches parts together and is“clepid the hors” (197), and the zodiac band, or as Chaucer clarifies,“the cercle of the bestes” (336). Finally, star pointers on the rete aresometimes “disposed in signes of bestes, or shape like bestes” (342).Surviving instruments in the Chaucerian style in fact incorporate suchfigures as a hound’s head, bird beaks, serpent tails, and human faces, onwhich more below.90 So many figures are projected within a beguilingmatrix, employing animal intermediaries to make the science intelligi-ble; they are translational, instrumental to the kind of story it can tellabout itself.

Mechanimal Devices and Animating Fictions

In other places outside the Astrolabe, in the extended literary mode ofromance and dream vision, Chaucer recurs to zoomorphic intermediariesin order to think through technical translation and instrumentation.Astrolabic metaphors now rise to the level of metacognitive devices,where instrumental images seem to have broken loose from pragmaticimmediacy to form medieval science fictions about fictions of science.Marijane Osborn has already shown that the mechanical horse in Chau-cer’s Squire’s Tale, presented as a gift from the king of Arabia, sharesfeatures in common with the astrolabe.91 The otherworldly flyingmachine, which can transport its rider anywhere within twenty-four

89 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,2011), 21.

90 Owen Gingerich, “Zoomorphic Astrolabes and the Introduction of Arabic StarNames into Europe,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 500, no. 1 (1987): 89–104 (95).

91 Marijane Osborn, “The Squire’s ‘Steed of Brass’ as Astrolabe: Some Implicationsfor the Canterbury Tales,” in Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, ed. Patrick J. Gallacherand Helen Damico (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1989), 121–31; theargument is developed further in Osborn, Time and the Astrolabe, 34–54.

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hours, functions by means of a pin that recalls the “horse” holdingtogether the parts of an astrolabe. Osborn concludes that the pseudo-equine contrivance “serves as a metaphor for the astrolabe in terms ofits national origin, its composition of brass, and its function (its abilityto move about according to the rider’s will within that astrolabic ‘space’marked with four and twenty hours.”92 In the romance, the phenome-nology of ingenious devices, both scientific and aesthetic, is at issue. AsPatricia Ingham elucidates, the mechanical marvel “alludes to a powerof creation beyond nature or the human.”93 In the presence of such won-drous novelty, learned and unlearned observers are as “fascinated” asthey are “stupefied.”94 It seems the horse is a fantasy of the superiortechnoscientific matter that confounds simple understanding, register-ing the primacy of objects over knowing subjects. The technologicalobject, as thematized here, shades over into the occult. What is more,the astrolabe seems to have shifted in the process from practical scienceto literary discourse, proving again the power of the multimodal deviceto populate the imagination with figures.

A corresponding metamorphosis of the astrolabe can be found inChaucer’s House of Fame. Osborn only goes so far as to observe thatChaucer may have used an astrolabe to work out celestial coordinatesimplied in the poem. On December 10, the night Chaucer (in the guiseof “Geffrey”) dreams of the golden eagle, the poet could have checkedto see that constellations were arranged so that the sun rose over thehorizon just ahead of the “Eagle star Altair.”95 Osborn is alluding to thefact that Altair (Alpha Aquilae) comes from Arabic al-nasr al-tair for“flying eagle,” anchoring the constellation of Aquila (i.e., Eagle). To thiswe can add that another bright star shares similar nomenclature and isconveniently situated nearby. Vega (Alpha Lyrae) is Latinized from Ara-bic al-nasr al-waqi, “swooping eagle.” What is yet more intriguing isthe way astrolabes make use of the avian imagery. In diagrams of therete in manuscript copies of Chaucer’s Astrolabe, both fixed stars aresometimes labeled and, in the case of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e.Museo 54, fol. 2v, and Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.III.53,

92 Osborn, Time and the Astrolabe, 53.93 Ingham, The Medieval New, 133.94 Ibid., 136.95 Ibid., 50.

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fol. 213v, Vega is figured as a bird.96 The drawings reflect the fact thatstar pointers are occasionally zoomorphic in surviving brass astrolabesof the Chaucerian type. An early fourteenth-century example indicates“Altair” by a bird body on the left branch, and “Wega” by the beak ofa bird perching on the right branch of the Y-shaped rete (Fig. 4). Onanother astrolabe from the same century, a complete bird on the leftbranch points to “Wega.”97 Astrolabes elsewhere incorporate not a horsebut a bird into the design of the wedge.98 Evidence quickly mounts tosuggest that the shimmering eagle of The House of Fame does not evokestars so much as the silhouette of an astrolabe star pointer. Chaucer’seagle seems to relish his role. Gaining altitude, the bird draws the atten-tion of his prey to neighboring celestial phenomena: “cast up thyn ye. /Se yonder, loo, the Galaxie, / Which men clepeth the Milky Wey” (935–37). He is eager to show what he knows: “Wilt thou lere of sterresaught?” (993). Had the poet taken him up on the offer, he would havelearned that Altair and Vega are situated on opposite sides of the MilkyWay. We can draw the conclusion that the eagle carries Geffrey within

96 Other birds appear on retes drawn in Bodleian Library, Ashmole 391 and BritishLibrary, Sloane 314, as noted by Jim Bennett and Giorgio Strano, “The So-Called‘Chaucer Astrolabe’ from the Koelliker Collection, Milan: An Account of the Instru-ment and Its Place in the Tradition of Chaucer-Type Astrolabes,” Nuncius 29 (2014):179–229 (202). For a treatment of star names on astrolabes see David A. King, “TheStar-Names on Three 14th-Century Astrolabes from Spain, France, and Italy,” in Sicitur ad astra: Studien zur mittelalterlichen, insbesondere arabischen, Wissenschaftsgeschichte; Fest-schrift fur Paul Kunitzsch zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Menso Folkerts and Richard P. Lorch(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 307–33 (314, 319).

97 Epact 40428 (British Museum, MLA 1909, 6–17.1) and 61916 (Museum of theHistory of Science, Oxford, 49359). The Tomba astrolabe (Museo Galileo, Florence, Inv.3931) is another example of the latter type, on which see Bennett and Strano, “The So-Called ‘Chaucer Astrolabe.’ ” See Eagleton’s “Chaucer’s own astrolabe” for the sugges-tion that—notwithstanding British Museum, MLA 1909, 6–17.1, which has the date1326 etched on the back—several so-called Chaucerian astrolabes probably take theirdesign from Chaucer’s description, and so would have come after his treatise. Bennettand Strano offer counter-evidence to support the more usual idea that diagrams inselected copies describe an already existing type.

98 See CCA, no. 144 (dated 1304, from the Maghrib) and no. 4001 (dated 1224,made in Moorish Spain), in Gibbs and Saliba, Planispheric Astrolabes, 138, 187. For morebirds on European and non-European astrolabes see Gingerich, “Zoomorphic Astro-labes,” 93, 97. A thirteenth-century French astrolabe is festooned with birds, includinga whole Corvus (Collection Max Elskamp, no. 400, Musee de la Vie Wallonne, Liege).An English astrolabe from the fifteenth century has “coru[us]” (the raven) inscribed onthe body of a bird (CCA, no. 2006, in Gibbs, Planispheric Astrolabes, 153–54 and Fig.20), while another from the fourteenth century has a bird standing in the place (Wh.1264, Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge).

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Fig. 4. Zoomorphic star pointers on the 1326 Chaucer Astrolabe (British Museum, MLA1909, 6-17.1; Epact 40428). “Altair” and “Wega” are indicated by birds on the rete;other star pointers take the form of beaks, bird bodies, and human and dog heads. Withthanks to the British Museum.

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the vicinity of two stellar “eagles,” with the additional and rather comi-cal implication that, on an astrolabe, both eagle and poet can be foundsomewhere within the small space between the two branches of aY-shaped rete. It would be consistent with the poem’s diminishingperspective—where earth vanishes to a point, and the poet is reducedto caricature—to find Chaucer miniaturizing himself in The House ofFame.99

Lending further support to the notion of an instrumental eagle is the2005 discovery of a copper-alloy Eagle Astrolabe Quadrant from St.Dunstan’s Street, Canterbury (Fig. 5). Elly Dekker has worked out thegeographical latitude (corresponding to London, 52�) and probable date(1388).100 The front of the device shows some familiar arcs of the astro-labe, effectively folded over on themselves.101 The back of the instru-ment depicts “a bird of prey, clearly an eagle, with its wings spread,fixed to the quadrant by a rivet in the middle around which it couldonce turn. . . . The oxidation spots in front of the left foot of the eaglemay be the remnant of a prey held in its claws.”102 The eagle, with itslegendary ability to gaze at the sun, is an appropriate emblem for adevice made to take solar altitudes, and in this connection Dekker men-tions that the royal eagle in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls possesses acutevision (“There myghte men the royal egle fynde, / That with this sharplok perseth the sonne”).103 But there may be another and more sustainedaquiline analogue in The House of Fame. There Geffrey is seized by agolden eagle, blazing as “another sonne” (506), who imparts amateurlessons in physics and astronomy. It would seem to suggest the adventof radiant intelligence, conveying the mind to contemplate higherthings, answering the poet’s desire for inspiration from the sun-godApollo, “O God, of science and of lyghte” (1091). Yet Chaucer’s poemis an ironic vision of what can be achieved by means of something like

99 For Chaucer’s recursive literary miniaturization in the Canterbury Tales, see Mitchell,Becoming Human, 104–15.

100 Elly Dekker, “ ‘With his sharp lok perseth the sonne’: A New Quadrant fromCanterbury,” Annals of Science 65, no. 2 (2008): 201–20 (212, 218).

101 The instrument can be visualized as an arc that is one-quarter of a circular plani-spheric astrolabe, with which it shares many features: hour lines, north pole, horizon,tropics, equator, and ecliptic containing the names of the zodiac. The zodiac is deline-ated on a simplified rete, obtained by stereographic projection, whose lines are effec-tively folded to fit within the 90 arc (much in the way a parchment sheet is folded twiceto create the quarto format).

102 Ibid., 214.103 Ibid., 219, citing PF, 330–31.

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Fig. 5. Front and back of the Eagle Astrolabe Quadrant, c. 1375–1425 (BritishMuseum, 2008, 8017.1) discovered in the ground down the road from Canterbury’sWest Gate. The front of the instrument shows pole, horizon, tropics, equator, and soon together with the zodiac on a partial rete, after the usual method of stereographicprojection; the back contains a calendar, in the center of which is a spread eagle,originally moveable and gripping prey. With thanks to the British Museum.

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an astrolabe. In The House of Fame the bird’s capacity to act as any kindof instrument of knowledge is exactly in question, with the implicationthat we should not automatically trust dazzling figures of scientia media.

Chaucer is at his most satirical and self-referential in The House ofFame, interrogating the merits of informational media and intellectualintermediaries, including animal figures. He makes much of the mid-dling status of an astronomical eagle. Geffrey is abducted and trans-ported to a realm between heaven and earth, and along the way learnsthat human communications are insubstantial: “every speche that ysspoken, / Lowd or pryvee, foul or fair, / In his substaunce ys but air”(765–68). What is at stake are the epistemic means of acquiring andtransmitting knowledge in a sublunary realm where humans are relianton devices. At a critical juncture in the vision the problem seems tocome to a head. In reach of the constellations, when the eagle asks thedreaming poet if he would like to learn more about the stars, Geffreydemurs. It can seem like a missed opportunity, impugning an unambi-tious or naıve outlook (Chaucer, ever the avid indoorsman!). Yet thesatire points in more than one direction. For the vision is a mere fantasyin which a poet—or rather, a spectral image of one—is ported throughimaginary space and time. There is no such magical conveyance as anastronomical eagle. Geffrey’s demurral, in effect, recalls the overambi-tious intellect back to the mundane necessity and effectiveness of instru-ments. Chaucer counts himself among earthbound observers whoseagents of translation are limited even as they remain indispensable. Atone point he alludes to his London living quarters (“domb as any stoon, /Thou sittest at another book” [656–57]), and we may well imagine inhis possessions an eagle astrolabe quadrant for the same latitude. Codexand quadrant are both communicative media that express and embodyscientific authority that is put under immense strain in Chaucer’s Houseof Fame. In this work, the factual becomes simulacral (1074–82).

Chaucer is interested in the possibilities and liabilities of technologiesthat seem to cross the threshold between animate and inanimate. In theAstrolabe he goes so far as to speak of the independent agency andauthority of the device quite apart from human implementations, imag-ining that the instrument has yet to disclose everything about itself:“Truste wel that alle the conclusions that han be found or ellys possiblemight be founde in so noble an instrument as in an astrolabe ben un-knowe parfitly to eny mortal man in this regioun, as I suppose” (13–16).On the one hand, the instrument is a ready tool that brings some things

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within reach. On the other, the multifunction mechanism becomes aphantom presence and takes on a life of its own in Chaucer’s Astrolabe.As Ruth Evans says, Chaucer shows that “the artifacts we use to thinkwith embody more knowledge than can be perfectly comprehended byone human.”104 It is one of the enigmas to which Stanislaw Lem’s Summatechnologiae is addressed in imitation of the great medieval theologicalcompendia of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. In Lem’s futuris-tic account—faced with omnipotent machine intelligence—we will ven-erate devices instead of a divine mind. What I take to be useful in Lem’sapocalyptic reveries is not the supposed rupture between medievaland modern systems but rather the idea of an articulate and semi-autonomous apparatus. Responsive to the untapped noetic capacity,Chaucer bequeaths a palpable sense of how the human subject comes torely on instrumental intensifications of memory, attention, and action aselaborated and embodied in transmedial technics. This is not to neglectdistinctions between old and new media. Implicit in this essay is thecritical importance of attending to the gap, appreciating the distinctivemetaphors and meanings of pre-digital machines, suggesting that it isnever wise to jump to identify astrolabes with our smartphones or GPS.There are surely advantages to studying earlier technocultures in con-text, unboxing technical matter.105 Nor is my idea to gush utopian for

104 Ruth Evans, “Our Cyborg Past: Medieval Artificial Memory as MindwareUpgrade,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 64–71 (68).

105 The seductive cinematic or virtual magic associated with digital media today,where users are prompted to take visual outputs to be fundamental to computing pro-cesses, produces what has been diagnosed as “screen essentialism.” In a pre-electronicdevice, there is not the same screening-out of materiality and active processes. For cri-tiques of frictionless computing and screen essentialism see Kirschenbaum, Galloway,Emerson, and others; the idea of the digital as cinematic comes from Stanley Cavil, asdiscussed by Galloway in The Interface Effect, 8–11. The idea is that, in relation to mod-ern computers, the screen comes between the user and the machine with the effect ofblackboxing objects and technical operations that make computing possible. Connected,born-digital media consumers then become accustomed to passive, frictionless specta-torship and are encouraged in the fallacious ideological split between “media” and “non-media,” software and hardware. Preferring pixels to code processes and hardware chassis,mathematical and material elements get relegated to the status of substrate. Only thegraphical user interface appears to be engaged in higher functions of conceptualizingand interpreting; the rest is appliance. By contrast, the astrolabe interface is a hapticand visual mechanism whose operations are not merely simulated or symbolic, restrictedto a surface membrane (“screen”); there are procedures to follow, dials to move, func-tions to perform. Part of what is peculiar is the effort required to overcome resistancesto interpretation and work out meanings in practice. Practitioners, not mere consumers,are needed. The astrolabe is a platform one must configure and on which one mustperform as a competent actor, hand and head engaged. Employing such an interface,

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post- or trans-human technocultures, since we can hardly ignore themenace of transnational capital, digital surveillance, toxic waste, andexploitative labor in the digital age. Chaucer for his part resists fetishiz-ing technical objects even as he finds them fascinating and worthy oftechnical specification. More work is needed to elucidate the manysources of trouble, but Chaucer’s works portend the technoscientifictransformations with which we grapple, and so might help us to imag-ine more inclusive figures of the future.

you continually “show your work.” As The House of Fame suggests, medieval instrumen-tality puts strict limits on aspirations to technological transcendence.

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Transmedial Technics in Chaucer’s Treatise on the ...Chaucer’s Astrolabe may seem relatively restrained and unimaginative to readers expecting more in the way of the poet’s signature