Almageste, Astrolabe, and Augrym Stones: A List in the Miller’s Tale

ABSTRACT

The first description in the Miller’s Tale is an ekphrastic tour of Nicholas’s room, beginning with tools for astrological calculation: his Almageste, his astrolabe, and his augrym stones. Listed through anaphora on three successive lines and scaffolded alphabetically on A, these objects are agentic props that gain instrumentality through their prosodic arrangement. Drawing on scholarship on the list, which points to the ways that lists mystify and resonate with scientific taxonomies, and discussing practices of alphabetizing by Chaucer and his contemporaries, this article argues that the form, both alphabetical and listological, in which these objects are sequenced in the Miller’s Tale introduces a private room at home as a site of poesis as it sets the tale’s plot in motion.