Geoffrey Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe is a unique example of late medieval scientific prose writing. It is also the Chaucerian text that most explicitly expresses the English poet’s ideas about language, translation, and the power of literature to shape the human understanding of the universe. The Treatise is a late-career text, written between 1391 and 1392, roughly the same period during which Chaucer also wrote much of The Canterbury Tales. Thirty-two medieval manuscripts survive today, suggesting that the Treatise was the poet’s second most widely copied and circulated text behind the Tales.
Deriving its name from the Greek term for “star-catching&r…
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Citation: Brooks, Michelle. "A Treatise on the Astrolabe". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 October 2022 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6921, accessed 21 November 2024.]
