Twice in The Wif of Bathes Prologue occur both the name of the Almagest and that of its author:
“‘Who-so that nil be war by othere men,
By him shul othere men corrected be.
The same wordes wryteth Ptholomee;
Rede in his Almageste, and take it there.’”
(D. 180-183)
“Of alle men y-blessed moot he be,
The wyse astrologien Dan Ptholome,
That seith this proverbe in his Almageste,
‘Of alle men his wisdom is the hyeste,
That rekketh never who hath the world in honde.’”
(D. 323-327)
Professor Lounsbury (Studies in Chaucer, ii p. 186 and pp. 396-7) has difficulty in explaining why Chaucer makes the Wife of Bath attribute these moral maxims to Ptolemy. He is inclined to think that Chaucer, so to speak, was napping when he put these utterances into the mouth of the Wife of Bath; yet elsewhere he acknowledges that the supposition of confused memory on Chaucer’s part in this case is hard to reconcile with the knowledge he elsewhere displays of Ptolemy’s work. I think it very probable that Chaucer’s seeming slip here is deliberate art. The Wife of Bath is one of Chaucer’s most humorous creations and the blunders he here attributes to her are quite in keeping with her character. From her fifth husband, who was a professional scholar and a wide reader, she has picked up a store of scattered and incomplete information about books and names, and she loses no opportunity for displaying it. At any rate, whether or not Chaucer had read the Almagest in translation, his many cosmological and astronomical references show clearly his acquaintance with the Ptolemaic system of astronomy.
[2] An Arabian scholar of the eighth century.
[3] 1.18 ff. “This tretis, divided in fyve parties, wole I shewe thee under ful lighte rewles and naked wordes in English; for Latin ne canstow yit but smal, my lyte sone.”
[4] “And Lowis, yif so be that I shewe thee in my lighte English as trewe conclusiouns touching this matere, and naught only as trewe but as many and as subtil conclusiouns as ben shewed in Latin in any commune tretis of the Astrolabie, con me the more thank;” Prologue to the Astrolabe, 35-39.
[5] Skeat, Notes on the Astrolabe, Prologue, 62. “Warton says that ‘John Some and Nicholas Lynne’ were both Carmelite friars, and wrote calendars constructed for the meridian of Oxford. He adds that Nicholas Lynne is said to have made several voyages to the most northerly parts of the world, charts of which he presented to Edward III. These charts are, however, lost.”
[6] The Astrolabe, I. 8.9. According to Warton the work in question is an introduction to judicial astronomy. (Lounsbury, II. 398.)
[7] F. 1273. “His tables Toletanes forth he broght.”
[8] Englische Studien III 209. See also J. S. P. Tatlock, “Chaucer and Dante,” in Modern Philology, III, 367. 1905.