ABSTRACT
Chaucer’s interest in the world extended from the appearances of people and love and ordinary life to the underlying difficult intellec tual theorising. His interest was secular. He had not been to the university, and he was not interested in the high-powered theology that developed in Italy, Germany, France and Oxford in the thir teenth and fourteenth centuries. His mind was o f a more worldly, less abstract turn, and his dominant interest in love was clearly no pose. It would no more have been satisfied by scholastic analytic philosophy than it was by The Dream of Scipio. O n the other hand, science interested him gready, especially astronomy, o f which some kinds of astrology were part. He was interested in dreams and their classification, as well as in other scientific knowledge which he picked up from Macrobius. Medical, historical, grammatical knowledge he picked up from such encyclopedias as those by Vincent of Beauvais, the Speculum Historiale, Speculum Morale (Mirror of History, of Morality), or from Bartholomew the Englishman’s De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things). He had a passion for knowledge and thought. But like a concerned scientist today he was driven further, to attempt to understand something o f the nature o f the world. His sceptical, questioning, yet constructive mind needed more than emo tional religious devotion could offer him. He read with passion for there were problems that needed to be solved. In the same spirit today an educated man or woman of the world, interested in the developments o f the arts and sciences, dissatisfied with the appar ently baseless speculations o f theology, not concerned with the pro fessional philosophy o f the universities, will read difficult though non-specialist books and articles on general questions about life.
