Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations

Abstract

Michael Warren's book examines representations of birds in well-known medieval poetic works written in Old and Middle English: The Seafarer, Exeter Book Riddles, The Owl and the Nightingale, The Parliament of Fowls, and Confessio Amantis. With lucid prose and thought-provoking claims, this book should engage everyone from seasoned medievalists to graduate students to literary scholars interested in Animal Studies. The book's thesis fashions an evolving tapestry about its subjects rather than a binding net: because birds resisted easy categorization and embodied transformative possibilities, writers used them to “enhance and undercut literary figurative procedures” (p. 10). Using a methodology that he partly attributes to Erica Fudge (p. 220), Warren asks about the relationship between experiential possibilities (“real birds” and humans perceiving them) and the medieval texts that represent them. Thus, the interpretive project of attending to specific literary descriptions of birds as they progress uniquely through each medieval poem is informed by what can be gleaned about “real birds,” as well as ancient and medieval philosophy, historical and literary contexts, and present-day ornithology.The Introduction (pp. 1–23) positions Birds in Medieval English Poetry in relationship to ecocriticism and Animal Studies, noting that the “modern paradigms” of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Claude Lévi-Strauss would not “have been incomprehensible to medieval thinkers” (p. 7). The claims of medieval and modern thinkers “thinking with birds” resonate across centuries. They share a fascination with the degrees of difference and similarity between avian- and humankind: birds are bipedal, but most can fly or float on water; their songs and calls remind of us of human song and language; and their flight has long served as a metaphor for the movement of the mind and soul. In their diversity they resist classification. Onomatopoeic names, as both signifiers and metonyms, demonstrate how birds (or the birds of human representation) cross literal and figurative boundaries. These characterizations set the basis for subsequent chapters.Chapter one, “Native Foreigners: Migrating Seabirds and the Pelagic Soul in The Seafarer,” (pp. 25–63) (an earlier version of which appeared in English Studies, 98 [2017], 825–845) cites Andrew Whitehouse in arguing that birds’ “sound-making” is also “place-making” for early English listeners, who glossed Latin names for birds with English names grounded in onomatopoeia and other experiential details. Warren argues that, in describing six species of seabirds, The Seafarer recreates a “littoral environment” where rocky land and sea meet (p. 39). The seabirds, as liminal figures, enable the pilgrim to associate the pelagic soul's journey with their migratory movements. Warren challenges the notion that birds in The Seafarer were straightforwardly allegorical or ornamental, saying that early medieval English ideas about species relations “were, in fact, nuanced, competing, experiential” (p. 36). These nuances abound in archeological and linguistic evidence featured, for example, in the Bishopstone excavation and Kristopher Poole and Eric Lacey's “achaeacoustic reconstruction” of avian aurality (p. 40). Thus, the textual and imagistic representation of early medieval English birds—being “stubbornly literal as well as powerfully figurative” (p. 44)—provides a path (literal and figurative) for understanding the soul's own bird-like epistemological and ontological journey.The second chapter, “Avian Pedagogies: Wondering with Birds in the Exeter Book Riddles,” (pp. 65–101) addresses the role of “wondering” in early medieval English pedagogical tools, including the Old English and Anglo-Latin riddle traditions, glossaries, and grammars. Warren claims that interest in “wonder” during this earlier period does not entirely accord with Caroline Walker Bynum's description of wonder in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries or with Brian McFadden's discussions of Exeter Book texts. Warren argues that rather than using wonder to enclose and confine representations of the natural world, the riddles productively call attention to the discursive and epistemological limits of their solvers. Those riddles specifically focused on birds “enrich our wondering not through closing down, controlling or stripping away, but through opening up and perpetuating mystery” (p. 71). For example, the chapter's section on Riddle 24 (“jay”) describes an Escher-like “perpetual movement between likeness and difference” that simultaneously affords glimpses of occultum similitudinem rerum (a “hidden similarity of things,” quoted p. 72) and an erosion of categorical differentiation and signification. The poem's use of runes and the potential slippage between human and bird vocalization also play roles in the perpetual mystery of the jay and its riddle. The chapter additionally addresses Old English Riddles 7–10, 26, 51, 57 and Aldhelm's Latin Enigma 59, describing similar tensions between knowledge and mystery.Chapter three, “A Bird's Worth: Mis-Representing Owls in The Owl and the Nightingale,” (pp. 103–44) describes how the common medieval tropes of sinful owls and romantic nightingales become complicated by the often ludicrous, comedic arguments in this debate poem. Warren describes how the arguments draw from a combination of observable ornithological behaviors and the metaphorical interpretations and misrepresentations of these behaviors in bestiaries, beast fables, and lays. The attribution of positive values to the owl, usually figured as a filth-ridden sinner, Warren traces to its positive depictions in Hugh of Fouilloy's Avarium and the Ancrene Wisse. The majority of the chapter, however, moves the reader through examples of overly literal interpretations of allegory, overly metaphorical interpretations of actualities, and comedic “disruption to species discreteness” (p. 124; see especially pp. 129–31), describing how these observations were influenced by the scala naturae (chain of being) and Book of Nature models (pp. 107 and 126). While previous critics have analyzed the absurdities in this avian disputatio, Warren's contribution brings his observations on the owl and nightingale's arguments into conversation with Karl Steel's analyses of philosophical and literary justifications for violence against both nonhuman species and humans, such as Jews in thirteenth-century Norwich, who were likened to animals (pp. 134–44). Warren does not claim that the poem sets out to criticize such violence, but implies that criticism is embedded in the poem's ongoing deflation of seemingly proverbial truths and the moral pigeonholing of species, stating “human-aspiring birds can also reveal the troublesome ambiguities of species boundaries, and how these can be misused” (p. 139).“‘Kek Kek’: Translating Birds in The Parliament of Fowls,” chapter four (pp. 147–77), plumbs lines 498–500 of Geoffrey Chaucer's dream vision to question the relationships between voice, articulate language, reason, and animality. As such, the chapter enters an ongoing and energetic scholarly conversation about what lines depicting birds’ cries (“Kek kek! kokkow! quek quek,” l. 494 of The Parliament of Fowls) mean in an allegorical poem that elsewhere represents them speaking Middle English. Warren argues that rather than reflect a debasement of the birds’ speech or social class, the lines represent “real birds’ voices,” forcing a rupture in the allegorical mode, or rather a doubling that creates the conditions for “translatability between species” (pp. 149, 148). Where medieval grammarians, along with the poem's narrator, would have interpreted these lines as “noise” or vox confusa (meaningless vocalization), Warren argues that the poem itself suggests that the birds speak meaningfully. Pointing to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's theory of an allegorical “middle space” and to the “both/and” hermeneutics in Augustinian and medieval allegory, he contends that avian voices and avian interests in The Parliament of Fowls exceed the confines of a simple anthropocentric allegorical reading.The final chapter, “Birds’ Form: Enabling Desire and Identities in Confessio Amantis,” (pp. 179–217) examines John Gower's adaptations of the Ovidian tales in which humans become birds. The chapter devotes most of its attention to the tale of Philomena, Procne, and Tereus (“Tale of Tereus”), at times comparing and contrasting Gower's version of Ceix and Alceone and Chaucer's eponymous characters in Troilus and Criseyde. Warren argues, contra Caroline Walker Bynum and Dorothy Yamamoto's focus on the horrifying and punitive sides of metamorphosis, that changing into a bird can be redemptive and enabling, as well as provide “sites of powerful revelation” (pp. 194, 188). The chapter first offers a close reading of Philomena's rape by Tereus, in which Gower compares Tereus to a goshawk and Philomena to a bird of prey. Warren demonstrates how these comparisons enable “moral ambiguities” (sexism, essentializing of rape as an instinctual male urge), despite the overt condemnation of rape in Gower's narrative. Warren argues that subsequent narrative choices make this initial bird metaphor integral to the story, so that when its characters experience metamorphoses, they become themselves in the bodies of actual birds in a manner that underscores “psychosomatic hybridity, an essential coming-togetherness in which the limits of human flesh are inadequate” (p. 209). The chapter brilliantly argues its points about the metamorphoses of Alceone to a kingfisher, Philomena to a nightingale, and Procne to a swallow, connecting their reembodiment as birds to not just an etiology of kingfisher, nightingale, and swallow, but an etiology of their combined human-avian stories. My only quibble is that, given the chapter's focus on redemption and the moral ambiguities in the representation of Tereus, I would have liked to hear more about Tereus's transformation into an actual hawk's body.The Epilogue (pp. 219–23) builds on previous chapters by claiming that representations of birds point to “intertwined human-avian histories and existences that can and do suggest an interdependence or compatibility that makes the bird integral, not marginal, to our self-conceptions” (p. 220). Focus on a shared world is the most difficult and fruitful imaginative task that Warren undertakes in Birds in Medieval English Poetry. For this reason, the book most assuredly lives up to the claim that in the medieval poems under discussion birds’ “materiality is always evident and deeply relevant” (p. 220).Accoutrements to the main body of the book also deserve description. The book's cover presents a stylized, concept-driven illustration that fuses the contemporary and the medieval. The cover designer has positioned Brian Lawrence's image of godwits above a marginal illustration in the Alphonso Psalter of a thrush and goldfinch. Thus, the flocking godwits appear to float far above the thrush and goldfinch, which face each other on a window ledge or architectural border. When explored, the image suggests simultaneously different modes of looking at and representing birds. Movement through time (the modern and medieval) is both captured on a two-dimensional plane and freed by the godwits escaping the frame. In contrast to the stylized front cover, an austere black and white photograph by Brian Lawrence precedes each chapter, presenting a single species of bird important to the chapter's focus. The list of illustrations (p. vi) replicates the captions that attend each photograph, which include the names of birds in modern English and Latin and selected lines of Old or Middle English poetry. Visually, the photographs are not just realism-infused reminders of the animals that inspired medieval authors. Their presence—although framed by human technology and aesthetic choices—affirms the otherness of birds, their strangeness, the inability to capture them (their thereness, their theirness) in a web of words, concepts, or images. If you wish to request a PDF of one of the book's chapters, you might consider adding a page number to the start of the request so that a scan of the illustration will be included. (For example, request pp. 24–63 for chapter one, instead of pp. 25–63). The book closes with a glossary of Old and Middle English bird names (pp. 225–36), bibliography (pp. 237–54), and index (pp. 255–59).