Chaucer as Teacher: Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe

Any society must look after its young and train them to take a place in the accepted organization of the culture. ¹ Although schooling was not as widespread during the fourteenth century as it is today, some children and young adults were instructed in the seven liberal arts, consisting of the trivium, which was grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium, which was arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. When we move from the general to the specific, we see that Geoffrey Chaucer was qualified to be an instructor in at least six of the seven liberal arts—grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy—and that he demonstrated these qualifications in his Treatise on the Astrolabe (a medieval astronomical instrument), which was written in or near the year 1391 ² and which was addressed at its beginning to the poet's ten-year-old son, Lewis Chaucer.