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The Equatorium of the Planets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

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The lost literature of medieval England, as Mr R. M. Wilson and R. W. Chambers before him have shown us, would probably occupy as much space in our libraries as what has survived. The earliest records tell of such losses as that of the Ingeld-lay which Alcuin reproaches the monks of Lindisfarne with being so fond of; and to the end of the Middle Ages we can compile for each century a formidable list of works which have vanished, some through the indiscriminate ravages of time, others, we need not doubt, victims to pious zeal (it was Fumivall who at a meeting of the Early English Text Society complained of a lack of Lives of the Sinners). But yet from time to time sunken treasure Is washed up, to be chanced upon and dragged away in triumph by some more fortunate beachcomber, whilst the rest of us stare after him in envy. This present century is hardly likely to see another so sensational discovery as when in 1934 the lost ‘Book of Margery Kempe’ appeared in the Victoria and Albert Museum to have its contemporary binding repaired, and proved to be not at all the improving but genteel vade mecum suggested by the extracts by Wynkyn de Worde and Pepwell, but rather the spiritual autobiography of one of the crackedest pots in all the annals of religious enthusiasm. Twenty-one years have not been long enough for medievalists to recover from this discovery; and now Dr Price comes along with what may be a new work by Chaucer, The Equatorie of the Planetis, which caught his eye in MS. Peterhouse College, Cambridge, 75.1.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1955 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 The Equatorie of the Planetis, edited by D. J. Price, with a linguistic analysis by R. M.Wilson (Cambridge University Press; 52s. 6d.).

2 J. L. E. Dreyer: History of the Planetary Systems (Cambridge, 1906), pp. 208‐13.

3 Walter Clyde Curry: Chaucer and the Medieval Sciences (Oxford, 1926), p. 120.

4 Ibid., pp. 160‐1.

5 De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book IV, Prose vi.