The First Technical Writer in English: A Challenge to the Hegemony of Chaucer

Abstract

The claim that Geoffrey Chaucer was “the first technical writer in English,” which appears several times in the recent literature on the history of technical writing in early English, misleads because numerous Middle English technical prose texts either precede Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe or are contemporaneous with it. In fact, an important tradition of technical writing exists in both Old and Middle English and extends through the English Renaissance. Historians of technical writing will find it more profitable to investigate the tradition of English practical prose than to find further firsts for their field.