Abstract
Chaucer’s House of Fame is a spectacular showcase of wonders and wonderment. This is established at the very outset of the poem when Geffrey, the narrator, is first struck with “wonder” as to the causes of dreams: “God turne us every drem to goode! / For hyt is wonder, be the roode” (1–2). In his first encounter with the eagle, the narrator “gan beholde more and more / To se the beaute and the wonder” (532–3); more and more these wonders stack up, and, by the poem’s ending, the narrator will have repeated “wonder” 26 times. Significantly, these wonders are intimately connected to seeing and experiencing motion—literally, the narrator sees “Wynged wondres faste fleen” (2118). Chaucer shows more than mere belletristic interest in movement, however—the conceptual idea of motion is very much a thematic and philosophical interest for Chaucer in writing the poem. Indeed, the poem encompasses a protracted lecture on the topic of “motion” itself.1 Although the eagle’s prolixity is admittedly comic, it is not merely fortuitous that his discussion on “change of place” (motus localis) is at the center of action in the poem (i.e., in the middle of Book 2). Rather, his long lecture on motion seems to define the developing logic and sine qua non of the poem’s action—the driving energies of mind and matter. Chaucer’s deep-seated interest in the sublunar realm of mutability (literally, “in erthe under the mone,” 1531) inevitably considers motion (change of place) as a subcategory of “accidental” change.
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Notes
The purported emphasis on sound is tangential. As Linda Tarte Holley points out, “The eagle’s discussion of motion leads to the explanation of sound, but it should be made clear that he uses sound as an example of motion”: Chaucer’s Measuring Eye (Houston: Rice University Press, 1990), 124.
J. D. North, Chaucer’s Universe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 14.
The possible exception being Linda Tarte Holley’s recent book: Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the Perle Poet, and the Cloud-Author: Seeing from the Center (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Wilbur Owen Sypherd, Studies in Chaucer’s House of Fame (1907; repr., New York: Haskell House, 1965), 99.
J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer’s “Book of Fame”: An Exposition of “The House of Fame” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 70.
For Dante’s text, see Dante Alighieri, De situ et figura, sive forma, duorum elementorum, aque videlicet et terre, trans. and ed. G. Padoan (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968).
see David Alexander, “Dante and the Form of the Land,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 76 (1986): 45;
All citations and translations of Dante follow The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970–75).
William F. Woods, “Symkyn’s Place in the Reeve’s Tale,” CR 39 (2004): 18.
Marshall Clagett notes how in Italy this title was synonymous with Richard Swineshead, and “the whole technique of treating qualities and motion in the Merton manner became known as ‘the calculations’”: The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 248.
J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974), 62.
Robert Epstein, “Sacred Commerce: Chaucer’s Friar and the Spirit of Money,” in Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Medieval English Literature, ed. Robert Epstein and William Robins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 139.
John E. Murdoch, “From Social into Intellectual Factors: An Aspect of the Unitary Character of Late Medieval Learning,” in The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed. John E. Murdoch and Edith D. Sylla (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1975), 288–9;283.
Wolfgang Clemen, Chaucer’s Early Poetry, trans. C. A. M. Sym (London: Methuen, 1963), 107.
Glending Olson, “Measuring the Immeasurable: Farting, Geometry, and Theology in the Summoner’s Tale,” CR 43 (2009): 414–27.
The paragraph is summarized from Edward Grant, Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550 (Westport: Greenwood, 2004), 217–18.
Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 99.
John E. Murdoch and Edith Sylla, “The Science of Motion,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 221.
Edith D. Sylla, “Medieval Quantifications of Qualities: The ‘Merton School,’” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 8 (1971): 15.
Walter Roy Laird, “Change and Motion,” in The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 2: Medieval Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Michael Shank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 428.
Edward Grant, Physical Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 56.
John Buridan, “Questions on the Eight Books of the Physics,” in Acutissimi philosophi reverendi Magistri Johannis Buridani… (Paris, 1509; Frankfurt: Minerva, 1964),
with the modification of A. Maier, Zwei Grundprobleme der scholastischen Naturphilosophie, 2nd ed. (Rome: edizioni di letteratura e storia, 1951), 209.
Edith D. Sylla, “Physics,” in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. Frank Anthony Carl Mantello and A. G. Rigg (Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 359.
This and all further quotations from Macrobius’s work are taken from Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 229.
Quotation from Kathryn L. Lynch, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 66.
Obrist, introduction to Liber secretorum alchimie, by Constantine of Pisa (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), 49.
John M. Fyler, “‘Cloude,’—‘And Al That Y of Spak’: The House of Fame, v. 978,” Neuphilologishe Mitteilungen 87 (1986): 565–8.
V. A. Kolve makes an important observation that as this narration proceeds, “one no longer knows whether we are to understand ‘engraved with letters’ or ‘with pictures’…this redaction of the Aeneid begins with words on brass and ends with pictures, perhaps on brass, perhaps on glass, perhaps painted on the wall”: Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), 41–2.
Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, Part Two: The Long Text, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), Chap. 5, 299–300.
See Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1984), 190–1
B. G. Koonce also calls it the “cage of the world”: Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame: Symbolism in “The House of Fame” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 245–8.
Edward Grant, “Cosmology,” in The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 2: Medieval Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2:446.
Nick Havely and Helen Phillips, Chaucer’s Dream Poetry (New York: Longman, 1997), 121.
John Buridan, Quaestiones super libris quattuor De caelo et mundo, ed. E. A. Moody (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1942), 226–32.
Augustine, Augustine: Later Works, trans. John Burnaby, vol. 8 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), 8:149.
Nicole Oresme, Le Livre du ciel et du monde, ed. Albert D. Menut and Alexander J. Denomy and trans. Albert D. Menut (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968) 2.25.139c.
Russell A. Peck, “Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions,” Speculum 53 (1978): 745–60,
Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1357–1900, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 1:22;
see Alastair Minnis’s chapter, “The Parliament of Fowls,” in Chaucer’s Shorter Poems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).
Quotation from Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Catherine Belsey, “William and Geoffrey,” in Shakespeare Without Boundaries: Essay in Honor of Dieter Mehl, ed. Christa Jansohn, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010), 181–2.
Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds., The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
A. C. Spearing, “Dream Poems,” in Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 175.
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© 2015 Alexander N. Gabrovsky
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Gabrovsky, A.N. (2015). Thought Experiments in Geffrey’s Dream: The Poetics of Motus Localis, Measurement, and Relativity in the House of Fame. In: Chaucer the Alchemist. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523914_2
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