“Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde
Ferther than the story wol devyse,
Hir name, allas! is publisshed so wyde,
That for hir gilt it oughte y-now suffyse.
And if I mighte excuse hir any wyse,
For she so sory was for hir untrouthe,
Y-wis, I wolde excuse hir yet for routhe.”[192]
We have said that Chaucer’s attitude toward the philosophical aspects of astrology is hard to determine because in most of his poems he takes an impersonal ironic point of view towards the actions he describes or the ideas he presents. His attitude toward the idea of destiny is not so hard to determine. Fortune, the executrix of the fates through the influence of the heavens rules men’s lives; they are the herdsmen, we are their flocks:
“But O, Fortune, executrice of wierdes,
O influences of thise hevenes hye!
Soth is, that, under god, ye ben our hierdes,
Though to us bestes been the causes wrye.”[193]
Perhaps Chaucer did not mean this literally. But one is tempted to think that he, like Dante, thought of the heavenly bodies in their spheres as the ministers and instruments of a Providence that had foreseen and ordained all things.
APPENDIX
I. Most of the terms at present used to describe the movements of the heavenly bodies were used in Chaucer’s time and occur very frequently in his writings. The significance of Chaucer’s references will then be perfectly clear, if we keep in mind that the modern astronomer’s description of the apparent movements of the star-sphere and of the heavenly bodies individually would have been to Chaucer a description of real movements.
When we look up into the sky on a clear night the stars and planets appear to be a host of bright dots on the concave surface, unimaginably distant, of a vast hollow sphere at the canter of which we seem to be. Astronomers call this expanse of the heavens with its myriad bright stars the celestial sphere or the star sphere, and have imagined upon its surface various systems of circles. In descriptions of the earth’s relation to the celestial sphere it is customary to disregard altogether the earth’s diameter which is comparatively infinitesimal.
If we stand on a high spot in the open country and look about us in all directions the earth seems to meet the sky in a circle which we call the terrestrial horizon. Now if we imagine a plane passing through the center of the earth and parallel to the plane in which the terrestrial horizon lies, and if we imagine this plane through the earth’s center extended outward in all directions to an infinite distance, it would cut the celestial sphere in a great circle which astronomers call the celestial horizon. On the celestial horizon are the north, east, south and west points. The plane of the celestial horizon is, of course, different for different positions of the observer on the earth.