Natural Law and Parliamentary Election in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls

Abstract

ABSTRACT Critics have reached the consensus that Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls reveals the fallibility of human reason in interpreting and applying the precepts of natural law. This article, however, asks the reader to look more closely and more skeptically at the common birds’ elections. Though Chaucer critically revises Thomas Aquinas’s concept of natural law by setting will against reason, as is personified in the parliamentary debates, the poet still allows the common birds to follow their natural dispositions when electing representatives and offering counsel. Only in the episode of the collective abuse of the cuckoo does Chaucer criticize the Commons for violating natural rights. The Parliament of Fowls parallels the turn from objective natural law to subjective interpretation of individual rights in intellectual history with the rise of the parliamentary Commons in late-fourteenth-century English constitutional history. As a result, it exposes the crisis of “commonalty” in the 1370s and 1380s.