For anyone who is a fan of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, young Geoffrey makes an appearance in Through the Lion’s Gate… well, more than an appearance. He becomes a key character, and we meet his parents, John and Agnes. John Chaucer was a wealthy merchant—an importer of wine, leather, and honey from Spain, and an exporter of wheat and timber. In fact, he was the vintner to King Edward III. Agnes was wealthy in her own right, having inherited many properties across London from her Uncle Hamo. When Elias Dorn’s apprentice, Tom, tells Geoffrey about the education he learned from the alchemist, his stories give the aspiring writer some ideas which 40+ years later become part of the Canterbury Tales. And you thought Chaucer did it all on his own, heh-heh.
In Through the Lion’s Gate, young Geoffrey Chaucer foreshadows his later profession as a writer when he composes a poem about Elias Dorn’s red hair. Six months before I finished my novel, we were in an Air BnB on the cliffs of Niolon, France, across the bay from Marseilles when I finally solved the rhyme, thanks to my wife, Joanne, for “cherries in jars,” which had long plagued me. She filmed me reading it.
Cardinals, apples, blood, beets, and bricks,
Beelzebub’s blush and ruby candlesticks.
Persephone’s fruit ’neath the abbot’s nose,
The comb of the cock and the Lancaster rose.
Flaming vermilion and cherries in jars,
Cinnabar sunsets mirroring Mars.
A bottle of claret and some mutton, rare,
Such is the color of his master’s hair.
When John Chaucer asked his son where he learned of Mars, Geoffrey said that he found it in Ptolemy’s Almagest which he found on his father’s bookshelf.
The Almagest by Ptolemy
The Almagest is a 2nd-century mathematical and astronomical treatise on the apparent motions of the stars and planetary paths, by Claudius Ptolemy (c. AD 100–170), written in Koine Greek, also known as Hellenistic Greek. One of the most influential scientific texts in history, it canonized a geocentric model of the Universe that was accepted for more than 1,200 years from its origin in Alexandria, into the medieval Byzantine and Islamic worlds, in Western Europe through the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, up until Copernicus. It is also a key source of information about ancient Greek astronomy.
The name comes from Arabic “al-majisṭī,” with “al” meaning “the” and “magesti” being a corruption of Greek μεγίστη megístē, “greatest.”