I have been re-reading some Chaucer recently for the territory book. I’ve decided that there won’t be a reading of Chaucer in the book itself – I was debating the land politics of The Knight’s Tale, in a similar mode to the readings of Beowulf and King Lear that are already in there. I’m just not sure that there is enough there to sustain the kind of reading I wanted. But there are a footnotes in a few places, especially in Chapter Three around his debt to Boethius – he translated The Consolation of Philosophy into Middle English. and there is said to be a borrowing in some parts of Troilus and Criseyde.

I also re-read The Miller’s Tale, which I did for English A-level twenty years ago… It really is very funny. There is a modern English translation, but this is pretty awful… take the opening lines

Whilom ther was dwelling in Oxenford/A riche gnof, that gestes held to bord

became

Some time ago there was a rich old codger/Who lived in Oxford and took a lodger

The Middle English is much better. This surely needs no translation:

Derk was the night as pich or as the cole,/And at the window out she putte hir hole,/And Absolon, him fil no bet ne wers/But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers/Ful savourly, er he were war of this./Abake he sterte, and thoghte it was amis,/For wel he wiste a womman hath no berd/He felt a thing al rogh and long yherd,/And seide, ‘Fy, allas! what have I do?’ (3731-39)

More seriously I was pleased to find that Nicholas – the student womaniser in the tale – is a would-be astrologer, who has a collection of interesting objects in his lodgings…

His Almageste, and bokes grete and smale,/His astrelabe, longinge for his art,/His augrim-stones, layen far apart/On shelves couched at his beddes heed;/His presse ycovered with a falding reed (3208-12).

And on hunting around a bit I discover two things which are new to me – augrim is supposed to be a Middle English rendering of algorism, from which we get algorithm, and was itself a misrendering of the name of the Arabic mathematician who first wrote on their theory; and that Chaucer himself wrote a treatise on the astrolabe.