Chaucer lived in a society that was aware of childhood and adolescence as distinctive stages of human life and which inherited practices whereby young people were brought up and trained for adulthood. Informally, at home, children were introduced to social norms, religion and work. Those from wealthier families underwent more formal education, mastering literacy at home, in schools or in great households, where they learnt reading, rules of courtesy, French and, in the case of some boys, Latin. Chaucer’s works refer in passing to most of these processes, with particular attention to adolescents, including university scholars. During the fifteenth century his works in general came to be seen as having educational value. The Astrolabe, first written for his son Lewis, seems to have been used for teaching reading to other young children while his major writings were recommended as suitable literature for older ones.

Chaucer lived in a society that was aware of childhood and adolescence as distinctive stages of human life and which inherited practices whereby young people were brought up and trained for adulthood. Informally, at home, children were introduced to social norms, religion and work. Those from wealthier families underwent more formal education, mastering literacy at home, in schools or in great households, where they learnt reading, rules of courtesy, French and, in the case of some boys, Latin. Chaucer’s works refer in passing to most of these processes, with particular attention to adolescents, including university scholars. During the fifteenth century his works in general came to be seen as having educational value. The Astrolabe, first written for his son Lewis, seems to have been used for teaching reading to other young children while his major writings were recommended as suitable literature for older ones.

Chaucer’s universe was an interconnected system, in which all things had their divinely ordered place. This chapter explores the sources and status of natural knowledge in the later Middle Ages, and Chaucer’s employment of that knowledge for poetic and didactic purposes. It explains how medieval philosophers used their inheritance of classical and Islamic knowledge, refining an understanding of a harmonious cosmos through the sciences of astronomy, cosmology, music and medicine. These were not just theoretical sciences, but practical arts. Chaucer understood, and explained, the astrological workings of tables and instruments and their predictive power for meteorology and medicine. He never let technicalities overwhelm poetry, but it is clear that the sciences were of great interest to Chaucer. They were worthy of serious study both for their practical potential and their philosophical or ethical implications, and a field in which, through his Treatise on the Astrolabe, Chaucer made his own unique contribution.