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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
In the article it is suggested that there might exist a relationship between Chaucer's Knight's Tale and his Monk's Tale, the latter of which is often listed among other tales about the "victimized children" (The Clerk's Tale, The Physician's Tale or The Prioress's Tale). The ancient and medieval tradition referring to the subject of Saturn's children has to be analyzed as double: the children can be either the individuals born at the time of the planet's domination, or the societies suffering due to the Age of Saturn they live in. Chaucer must have been familiar with that concept as well as interested in both astrology and astronomy in general. The pair: Kronos-Saturn was a significant constituent of that system. The predicament of Dante's and Chaucer's Count Hugolino and his children, who starved to death in Torre della Fame, might be interpreted in the light of the tradition of the Age of Saturn. The pathos of the tale has its source in the sacrifice of Hugolino's children.
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The children in The Canterbury Tales, and specifically the ones depicted in The Clerk's Tale, The Monk's Tale, The Physician's Tale and The Prioress's Tale belong to a certain family structure within which they are either subjected to acts of violence or victimized as a result of constituting a part of that configuration. Those characters may be viewed against the background of the allegorical images depicting the children of Saturn. It has partly been done by Peter Brown and Andrew Butcher in the study The Age of Saturn. History and Literature in The Canterbury Tales where the two authors maintain that Chaucer "appears to be drawing on a tradition whereby, in both literature and art, each planet was represented, together with an array of human beings (the so-called "children" of the planet), ordering activities over which that deity had particular control" (Brown and Butcher 1991: 215). In the study in question the primary instance of Saturnine offspring is Arcite in the Knight's Tale who dies as a result of that influence, which was instigated by Palamon's patron, Saturn's daughter Venus.
The mythographic tradition, whose part the 'children-of-the-planets' topic constitutes, was started in the antiquity and then continued in the Middle Ages under the influence of the writings of such oriental astrologers as Albumasar (786-866) or Abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi (903-986) (Sniezynska-Stolot 1994: 11). They transferred the late ancient tradition to the Middle Ages, where it was not considerably changed, but rather elaborated, and where it also became a part of what Sniezynska-Stolot calls "mimetic literature": the one constituting to a certain extent a reflection of the reality and the laws of the universe shaping it. Klibansky, Saxl and Panofsky indicate that the Arabic astrologers' writings became popular in the Latin west in the twelfth century, when Liber Alchandri philosophi started to function in a number of copies. Then the tradition of Saturn's children returned to Europe; its primary shape, however, was different from the later one, connected with the calamities caused by the god. The authors of Saturn and melancholy describe the primary image as thoroughly negative: the children of the planet were thieves, hypocrites and miserly (1979: 179). Only later did the topic of malice occur, hence Saturn's children could not be blamed for their misfortune. Significantly, according, the literary historians Chaucer can be treated as a representative of the mythographic tradition, therefore it is fully justifiable to search for Saturn's children in his writings (Sniezynska-Stolot 1994: 18). Nevertheless, one has to remember about the double perspective on that offspring: Saturn's children could be both the individuals born under the planet's influence and whole communities suffering at the time when Saturn reigns over the world. The individuals would turn out to be as malignant as their 'father', but the whole communities were merely victims of the planetary influence, which did not ruin their character, but it caused misfortune in their lives. The latter situation will be referred to more frequently in this article.
The list of medieval thinkers interested specifically in the influence of Saturn includes: Bernardus Silvestris in The Cosmographia, also known as De Universitate mundi, Alanus ab Insulis in Anticlaudianus, Arnoldus Saxo in the encyclopedic De coelo et mundo, Vincent of Beauvais in Speculum Naturae and Bartolomeus Anglicus in another encyclopedic work, De proprietatibum rerum. References to the planetary god can be also found in: William of Auvergne's De universo or Boccaccio's Genealogiae deorum gentilium libri. Obviously, the primary ancient source of the mythographic tradition is Ptolemy with his Tetrabiblos. All the subsequent writings on the subject, starting with the Arabian and Persian treatises and including the medieval renderings, derive their mythographic lore from that source. References to Saturn can not only be round in the scientific writing of the antiquity, as...
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