Chaucer's A Treatise on the Astrolabe, although written for a boy named Lewis, must have had quite broad readership as indicated by the number of surviving manuscripts: there are at least 32 identified manuscripts dated to the period between a1400 and a1600. Several of them contain figures, which, Gunther (1932: 480) claims, are so alike that 'there can be no doubt that they were taken from the same instrument'. The paper looks at the treatise from the so-far unexplored perspective focusing on the diagrams included. It considers the relation between the text and the diagrams examining issues surrounding (1) the number of diagrams, i.e. which portions of the text are illustrated in various manuscripts; (2) the design for the layout of pages, and (3) how important the diagrams are for the comprehension of the text. The analysis sheds light on some details concerning the process of organizing the work over the manuscript production. The study also compares the diagrams from various manuscripts to identify differences between them and thus attempts to answer the question of whether the surviving diagrams may have one common source and as well as that of whether the manuscripts show traces of copying from one another.
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