Cosmic Position in Chaucer's House of Fame

Chaucer’s House of Fame (ca. 1378-80) is a complex dream vision that presents its narrator, a stand-in for Chaucer himself, exploring a series of places shaped by his extensive reading. A quest for the source of fame, the poem is informed by similar narratives of dreams and imaginary journeys. Such voyages beyond the confines of the earth are expressions of the poetic imagination, but they also occur in medieval and classical literature within a divinely ordained and structured cosmos that included clear and symbolically important distinctions between the earth and the heavens. As a narrative of cosmic ascent, the House of Fame takes place within the imaginary space of the sphaera mundi, a model of the universe as a series of interlocking spheres with the earth at the center. The position of objects within this model determined their meaning and purpose. This essay examines astronomical details in Book II and argues that such details shape the setting of this part of the poem. Read in this light, the very air that the narrator moves through in Book II constitutes a setting equal in imaginative depth to the Temple of Venus in Book I or the House of Fame encountered in Book III.