Subtle Arts: Practical Science and Middle English Literature.

Published: Ph.D. Dissertation. Yale University, 2017. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.11(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Description: Shows how "Middle English writers tested the capabilities of their vernacular, experimenting with new genres and styles of literary composition, as well as with discursive conventions and practices borrowed from nonliterary fields," particularly the scientific discourses of medicine, alchemy, and astronomy. Chapter one, "Medical Maneuvers and the Prologue to Chaucer's 'Treatise on the Astrolabe'," compares Chaucer's prologue to Astr and Henry Daniel's Latin prologue to his Middle English medical treatise, the "Liber Uricrisiarum," situating them among "introductions to early English scientific translations within a longer rhetorical tradition of the medieval medical prologue," and describing how these writers appropriated Latinate rhetorical maneuvers and forms of familiar address into a vernacular introductory style."

Chaucer Subjects: Treatise on the Astrolabe
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Style and Versification