Rewriting “litel Lowys” in Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe

Abstract:This essay examines the biographical and literary contexts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s prose technical manual, A Treatise on the Astrolabe. An astrolabe is a handheld, circular brass instrument that allows users to read the stars and calculate geography; it can also portend human fates. As I argue, Chaucer, who wrote the Treatise for his young son, Lewis, situates the astrolabe as a vehicle for connection between father and son to overcome geographical separation. Over the course of the Treatise, Chaucer builds a narrative of familial reunion from which he apophatically writes Lewis out of the text to deny circumstances surrounding the boy’s maternity and, with the poetic device of apostrophe, calls back an alternative version of his son further amended by an astrological rewriting of Lewis’s birth. The essay concludes by directly bringing the Treatise into dialogue with Chaucer’s poetic writing to open up new ways to read the Treatise as a work of literature.