Medieval magic technologies, generally speaking, manipulate nature for practical purposes and evoke a sense of wonder in its spectators. For an object to assimilate into the category of magic technology, it must retain some semblance of realistic mechanical appearance yet possess capabilities that amaze and confound logical reasoning. It is this combination of technical prowess and ability to affect an otherwise unexplainable change in nature which we encounter in the attributes and vehicle of the knight in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale. Although the medieval mind found nothing ‘irrational’ in the occult, engineers sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to find a language to describe magic technologies that seemed to defy the laws of nature (Eamon 195). Eamon’s argument that in the 15th to 16th-centuries, “technology became less magical and more mathematical” (195) suggests a turn towards a more empirical vocabulary used to comprehend medieval technologies. When taken to bear on Chaucer’s 14th-century Canterbury Tales, this statement can be slightly problematic. For instance, while it accounts for the Chaucer’s still consistent use of poetic language and imaginative imagery employed when speaking of magic technologies in The Squire’s Tale, there are substantial moments where the intellectual context of technology had already begun to pivot from the domain of magic to that of science and mathematics. The Squire’s Tale is as fragmented in its narrative as it is limited by the language in which it uses to represent experiential reality. In fact, reading the mathematical reality vis-à-vis the poetic imagination of the brass horse itself reveals the coexisting planes of magical and mathematical, irrational and rational paradigms towards medieval technologies.
We are reminded, time and again, that the tale is a framed narrative articulated through reported speech; it is thus necessarily subject to the narrative choices that the squire makes (or does not make). It is mediated by his language which is “insufficient” (Chaucer 37) at best and non-existent at worst for he often detracts from the main narrative. The squire gets carried away, lacing his tale with a “fulsomnesse of his prolixitee” (405); he cannot account for certain phenomena such as the horse’s vanishment; and most prominently, his decision to keep to his narrative and “speken of aventures and of batailles” does not eventually happen (659). Here, and elsewhere throughout the text, we are reminded as much of the squire’s inability to accurately and mathematically represent reality as we are of the way in which he attempts to. This is established early on when, despite his inability to describe Canacee’s “beauty” that “lyth nat in [his] tonge, n’ yn [his] konnyng” (35), he does so anyway. Later, this ineptitude extends beyond representing the physiology of Canacee to the interpretation of the knight and his gifts. He and the courtiers all turn to, instead, poetic language, drawing on a classical inheritance and employ a literary lexis to make sense of and articulate what magic they encounter. The squire is dumbfounded by lay language in his attempt to “seye as [he] kan” (4) for his recount or account of magic technologies is limited by his “dull-witted” mind” (279); and in the absence of complete logical explanations, alternative modes of meaning making must operate in the form of an otherwise improbable animal fable. It is, as I shall demonstrate, not only through poetic imagination that the 14th-century text explored the possibilities of and attitudes towards medieval technologies, but also through moments of mathematical empiricism that medieval writers began to explain or speculate about technologies in a more rational manner. The Squire’s Tale sits in the middle of these two distinct paradigms of rational mathematics and irrational magic that, though can be thought of as separate and dichotomic, are in reality are far more fluid and certainly not mutually exclusive. In other words, they exist on a spectrum that affords writers a wide range of approaches to representing these technologies in diverse ways. In this essay, I shall re-examine how poetic language, imaginative imagery and mathematical explanations are used concomitantly to fill in the fragmentary gaps of logical knowledge to explain and account for them in Chaucer’s The Squire’s Tale.
According to his paper on “Technology as Magic in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance”, Eamon draws the conclusion that there was a direct correlation between the revival in the Italian Renaissance of the “classical tradition of mathematics” (195) and the shift towards a more mathematical, rather than magical, treatment of medieval technologies. Rightfully so, he further clarifies that Archimedean mathematics could neither explain all of the mechanical arts of the Renaissance, neither could it banish magic from technology altogether. Instead, magic came to be redefined as manifesting itself in different ways, one of them being through technology (197). Even natural magic became reframed as nothing more than “ordinary technology [when] seen from the perspective of Renaissance hermetic philosophy” and, more importantly, “the image of the magus even penetrated works on mathematical mechanics” (198). But this shift, as Eamon would have it, is supposed to have occurred much later than the creation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This is certainly true to the extent that a more definitive based on a larger majority of late Medieval works pivoted towards a mathematical and Renaissance-style train of thought regarding magic. However, Chaucer’s The Squire’s Tale in particular explores this notion of technology as both mathematical and magical in a bid to firstly, demonstrate that the shift had already begun to take root before the Italian Renaissance and secondly, likely also to suggest that these two frameworks of thought might be far more connected than they are first made out to be.
The Squire’s Tale, if anything, speaks to the reality that whatever incites wonder; whatever that is distant from common knowledge, or indeed common folk; whatever that is wholly different and cannot be explained contains within it some magical quality. This accounts for the obvious: the knight’s attributes, appearance, vehicle, even entrance can be read as a metonym for medieval technologies that appear magical to the untrained hoi polloi of the Cambyuskan court. However, I would like to begin with the court itself, the supposedly rational lay setting upon which this magical interruption later plays out. This court and its king, however, is presented in the tale as anything but ordinary and wonderless. That is, this “noble king” (12) of “so greet renoun” (13) dwells “At Sarray, in the land of Tartarye” (9) so distant from any English civilization. Immediately, an air of oriental exoticism and otherness galvanizes not only the tale but the entire landscape on which this tale is built including its primary characters. Additionally, the squire leaves out an inordinate amount of information that would otherwise detail the location and race of these peoples: “I wol nat tellen of hir strange sewes,/Ne of hir swannes, ne of hire heronsewes” (67-8). Even “in that lond" [emphasis mine], of which might as well be folklore for only “knyghtes olde” (69) can tell, the value of things is entirely subverted: Ther is som mete that is ful deynte holde/That in this lond men recche of it but small” (70-1). The reason the above is quoted so liberally is to establish the fact that It is not only the intruding knight in the latter part of the tale who appears magical, the court too seems to be magical to the eyes of the Squire and really to Britons too. It could be said that the Cmabyuskan king is really the mythical magical king who encounters a rational knight who bears with him a mathematically technologized steed rather than the other way around. To this end, it must be said the magical qualities inherent in the text exist way before the entrance of the knight; it is introduced as the way in which the squire encounters this happening in the first place. It lies also in the ways in which language is manipulated, constructed, obscured and represented in the form of linguistic omission and fragmentation on the part of the narrator.
Turning first to the brass horse, I wish to approach this encounter from two perspectives: the first being how the Cambyuskan court views and later speculates about its workings and second, how the knight himself attempts to explain the possibility of its function. Kenneth Bleeth remarks how magical elements in Western romance can be traced to instances of Arabian astrology and magic, further noting that earlier scholars have commented on how the knight’s horse, ring, mirror and sword are but “instances of natural magic” that are meant to ‘impose false appearances on the spectator” (12). Quoting Vincent DiMarco on the tale’s rationalization of magic, Bleeth explicates the possibility that there is no magic present in the tale at all because the gifts are interpreted to be magical only by “lewed observers who fail to understand their scientific or technological basis” (13). This might be the case to account for how the sourt “kan nat the craft” (Chaucer 185) and thus could only be left speculate on “How that it koude gon, and was of bras;/It was a fairye, as the peple semed” (200-201). The term ‘craft’ bears a double meaning—either referring to the magical underpinnings that have made this phenomenon possible or the craftsmanship of the horse which as the knight has explained comes from faraway oriental lands: “the king of Arabe and of Inde” (110).
Furthermore, the boundary between magic and mechanical invention is further complicated by the knight’s own enigmatic and ambiguous explanation that: “He that it wroghte koude ful many a gyn./He wayted many a constellacion/Er he had doon this operacion,/And knew ful many a seel and many a bond” (128-131). The court, and indeed the reader is left with more questions than answers at this point for there is no clarification as to whether the creator of the brass horse was a magician or an inventor, whether he dealt in the art of magic or science. Both seem to be at work in the horse and the text, thus rendering both objects of an esoteric and ambiguous art. Either way, however, the following arguments are made “after hir fantasies” (205) by “rehersynge of thise olde poetries” (206), drawing on myths of Pegasus and the “Grekes hors Synon” (209)—this is mythical classical tradition. On the other hand, an alternative reading is presented to us as well, one of classical empiricism and rational science: “Naturelly, by composiciouns/Of anglis and of slye reflexiouns” (229-30), drawing on examples of “Rome”, “Alocen”, “Vitulon”, and “Aristotle” (231-3). These two sides of the coin already suggest a shift in public perception regarding medieval technologies, but rather than a clear pivoting, we observe a complicated interplay between magical and mechanical sources of explanation within the figure of the brass horse. Each speculation leading to another (257-60) to the point where rationality and irrationality become inextricably intertwined and mixed. The classical tradition drawn upon could be one either solely of magical myth or empirical science if the tale were to end here. Chaucer however, dismisses an absolute worldview that prioritizes rationality over magic or vice versa. Instead, he marries them both within the knight’s explanation.
Instead of leaving the magical occurrences within the text as “an apparence ymaad by som magyk” (218) or an invention “Of queynte mirours and of perspectives” (234), all the “jangl[ing], demen[ing], and devys[ing]” (261) culminates in the knight’s explanation. One must “trille a pyn” (316) then “nempne hym to what place also,/Or to what contree, that yow list to ryde” (318-19). It is a mechanical invention that lies at the heart of the brass horse’s magical affordance rather than a mythical one. Here, the primary paradox arises: how is it that the final explanation given is one that embraces both a mechanical machinery and a magical incantation as the solution to the brass horse enigma? In fact “th’ effect of al the gyn” lies in the “trille [of] another pyn” (321-22). All at once, the creature is both animate and inanimate at the same time; both able to listen to the verbal uttered commands of its master and the operating based on a mechanical gear shift. Most intriguingly then, the Cambyuskan king “conceived in his wit aright/The manere and the forme of al this thing,/Ful glad and blithe” (336-38). Without confusion or question, the knight’s explanation is received well and good. For Bleeth, it is precisely by “locating the stranger’s gifts at the ‘edge of the known and the unknown and on the border between technology and magic’ (Fradenburg qte in Bleeth) that Chaucer provokes the sense of wonder that is a hallmark of romance narrative” (14). But more than that, I postulate that one of the key reasons why the gifts and the knight’s horse is abandoned literally and metaphorically without any further pressing for explanation or proof is to reflect the 14th-century medieval mind that did not see magic as technology and magic as marvelous as separate entities, one needing to banish the other for it to exist. Instead, both explanations and affordances were equally valid at this point in time and the fragmentary nature of both the text and its accompanying explanations within it only add to the atmosphere of wonderment that is clearly at the centre of the narrative.
The knight’s gifts also operate in the liminal space between magic and mechanics: while the gifts are all recognisable and tangible objects from reality, their powers seem at first to be impossible ones when read literally. The mirror that “Hath swich a myght that men may in it see/Whan ther shal fallen any adversitee” (133-34); the ring that allows for the translation and interpretation of speech and the knowledge of medical natural healing (149-54); and the sword that has the power to “kerve and byte” (158) but also to close wounds (165)—these gifts might have been a gesture towards the creative imagination of the Middle Ages which appealed to the expanding limitlessness of what a growing knowledge in the possibilities of science could bring. However, read symbolically, these gifts clearly represent revelatory effects or powers. That is, with these gifts, “ther shal no thyng hyde” (141) and meaning shall be made known to the user “openly and pleyn” (151). Even the sword reveals the heart and intention of the wielder. Ironically, for scholars such as Bleeth, it is unclear whether these gifts (including the brass horse) are instances of natural magic used to deceive others through illusion or an exemplar of medieval invention that creatively pushed the boundaries of what was scientifically possible. Yet it is precisely this ambiguity that lends to the air of wonderment that captured the medieval mind especially in literary works of fiction. The ring, sword, mirror and brass horse, all share one thing in common: that they are able to be make manifest the desires of an individual. In other words, the steed and the gifts share the attribute of translation and manifestation of a person’s inward desires into reality. Whether for translation or transportation, these gifts act in the same way that The Squire’s Tale seeks to do for they all transport the listener or reader through language into a world of their own imagination, making real their individual prejudices, assumptions through poetic language. In this manner, both the science within the text and literature of the text itself are forms of invention that generate magical qualities of translatio because just as the objects act as metaphorical devices to catalyse the manifestation of human desire, language acts as the mediatory device that catalyses the tale-telling as a form of subjective science. Thus, the text is a form of narrative technology itself and its fragments or gaps are the crevices between the lines from which the medieval imagination fills with either scientific explanations or magical speculations.
The second half of the tale then begs the question of whether the animal-human encounter between Canacee and the falcon in fact alters the role and figure of the magus. According to Eamon, “the magus symbolized Renaissance Europe’s confidence in the immense possibilities of science and technology” (203), further remarking that in the later 15th and 16th-centuries, “mechanical philosophy provided the hypotheses and mathematics provided the tools for the victory of man over nature” and that magic seemed to be increasingly anachronistic and out of place given its “emphasis on secrecy and the marvellous” especially to those who sympathised with the shift towards rational mathematical thought (203). This implies that the figure of the magus was not banished but rather, transformed into that of the scientist and mathematician for “the magus and the engineer […] were the very same person” (201). When placed in conversation with Chaucer’s text, it appears that the knight’s gifts of magical qualities catalysed the transference of knowledge and power to an otherwise lay character. Of interest here is how Chaucer deliberately chooses to remain ambiguous with regards to whether Canacee’s encounter with and later treatment of the female falcon is made possible because of her natural disposition or the mystical learned magic afforded to her by the knight’s ring and mirror. Canacee’s clarity of visions is attributed to her being “ful mesurable, as women be” (362) because she had not drunk to excess the night before, unlike the other courtiers. She also took genuine interest in the knight’s gifts rather than mindlessly putting them away and revelling in ostentation and luxury: “For swich a joye she in hir herte took/Bothe of hir queynte ryng and hire mirour” (368-9). These perhaps could be the naturally occurring circumstances that led to the “impressioun /Of hire mirour” (371-2). This, intertwined with the explicitly magical ability to connect with animals, interpret and speak their language, is later met once again with an ambiguous ability to dig herbs from the ground and “make salves newe/Of herbes preciouse and fine of hewe/To heelen with this hauk.” (639-41). Whether it is her natural disposition towards empathy or a magical gift afforded by the ring and mirror is not made clear and I argue it is this convergence of different possibilities, fragmented within the Squire’s tale that crystallises the Chaucerian blend of multiple varying modes of knowledge that possibly exists on the same intellectual plane within the figure of Canacee. She is both magus and healer, magician and engineer, allowing for the co-existence of different sources of knowledge to be reconstituted within the literary language of an animal fable. Within such an allegory, reality and non-reality merge, just as in the figure of Canacee and the falcon, urging readers to make meaning not out of the cohesiveness of the text but from the gaps in its already fragmentary narrative.
Ultimately, The Squire's Tale cannot be said to be solely championing for a more poetic or more mathematical approach towards medieval technologies. Instead, it should be read as an amalgamated product of both systems of thought: all that is magical has within it some form of rational empirical thumbprint; all that is mathematical must be articulated through a poetic lens so as to fully capture the magical quality we call wonderment. Neither can exist without the other. It is difficult, nearly impossible, to predict what Chaucer might have envisioned for the tale if it had indeed been completed without the Franklin’s interruption or the Squire’s own self-censorship. Yet I suggest that it is within this supposedly incomplete narrative that we derive the completeness of the tale at all. This is because much of what the Squire’s tale sets out to do cannot be accomplished through language: if he wishes to represent the wonders of the magical arts, he cannot do so because he cannot imitate the knight’s style; if he wishes to return to where he left off to finish the tale, he cannot because he will be interrupted and the tale would be too long; if he wishes to speak of great adventures and battles, he can only give a brief summary, not a full tale. Chaucer in this manner suggests language’s limitations in fully representing what one wishes to express. Hence, the most accurate way to capture the marvel of medieval technologies and immortalise a glimpse of the sort of wonderment that it evoked is to fragment all known, rational modes of knowledge—language, narrative, empiricism, logic—in favour of gaps, questions and, in the squire’s own terms, tales that are “lefte” but will never “ayeyn bigynne” (670). Only then, when definitive answers are not articulated, can the tale allow for an intermingling, a concurrent existence of magic and science, and perhaps even everything in between.
Works Cited
Bleeth, Kenneth, editor. “The Squire’s Tale: Introduction.” Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, Franklin’s Tale, and Physician’s Tale: An Annotated Bibliography, 1900 to 2005, University of Toronto Press, 2017, pp. 3–19. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt1x76h2c.6. Accessed 8 Nov. 2022.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “5.1 The Squire's Introduction and Tale.” 5.1 The Squire's Introduction and Tale, https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/squires-introduction-and-tale.
Eamon, William. “Technology as Magic in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.” Janus; Revue Internationale De L'histoire Des Sciences, De La médecine, De La Pharmacie, Et De La Technique, pp. 171–212.
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