A Speculative Look at Chaucer’s Education
J. Stephen Russell takes on the task of speculating about the kind of the education that Chaucer may have received in his 1998 text Chaucer and the Trivium: the Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales. Fleshing out the three-part education system, referred to as trivium, Russell explains:
“The first two of the arts known as the trivium, grammar and logic, constituted less a pair of distinct topics and more a continuum, a curriculum or sequence of skills with well-defined and lofty goals” (Russell 19).
The interdisciplinary nature of literature and knowledge, in this case logical knowledge, seemed to be as relevant in the medieval world of academia as it is now in our modern academic setting. The text and the thought-process behind them seemed to work together in the education system of the Middle Ages. It was important that were taught the proper ways to structure and compose their writing. With that, Russell clarifies:
For all its arcane terminology and numbing abstraction, late medieval logic was conceived of as fundamentally a practical art, unlike its modern counterpart. Medieval logic used no symbols or artificial representation system: the medium of medieval logical investigation was (all appearances to the contrary) everyday—Latin—language. This was because cognitive science was considered by its medieval practitioners to be the sister art of grammar in the struggle for recti loquendi et scribendi [the right to speak and write]. (Russell 20)
The question of consciousness was being tackled by studying the mechanics of both the language as well as the mind behind it. As an author, Chaucer needed to be aware of some basic theories of cognition when composing the House of Fame and his other works. Consciousness plays a major role in the formation of literature because, as a writer, you are responsible for creating an artistic representation of a fictional consciousness that will traverse through a fabricated landscape.
Within the topic of “logic”, Russell considered an overview of “a number of areas of cognitive science with which Chaucer was familiar: the prevailing models for cognitive processes, the Categories of Aristotle, Porphyry’s Tree, and the modes of supposition” (Russell 21).
What Russell refers to as “cognitive science” are models of cognition that were relevant during the period in which Chaucer wrote. While the term cognitive science may not have been used, the Middle English word “cognicioun” exists in the known vocabulary. The existence of the word in Middle English confirms that people during the Middle Ages were at least thinking about consciousness and the way that the mind works. Nowhere in the House of Fame does the word itself appear, but while Chaucer did not see a use for it directly, the inspiration for the word is relevant. Russell explains:
The most fundamental medieval analysis of cognition separated the intellect into the agens intellectus, which abstracts the important or essential elements from the sensory data (that is, ‘recognizing’) and the intellectectus passivus, which performs various rational operations on the elements provided by the agens intellectus (‘cogigating’). (Russell 22)
Breaking the mind into multiple parts and having those parts play a particular role in cognition is something that modern day cognitive scientists continue to do. It is continually proposed that different parts of the brain are responsible for different parts of our spectrum of cognitive abilities. Chaucer’s awareness of such a principle could be a valid source for his interest in the process of dreaming and the genre of dream visions in general.
*Again, because this is speculative, the assertion that is being made here is that Chaucer’s exposure to such discussions may have given him motivation to fabricate a dream poem, which reflects on the process of dreaming.