Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts ed. by Carolynn Van Dyke (review)

Abstract

carolynn van dyke, ed., Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. 286. isbn: 9-781-13704-073-2. $90.The ethically and philosophically praiseworthy purpose of Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, a collection of sixteen essays, is to push the vertical axis of traditional humananimal relations on its side. In part this involves resisting, and sometimes actively deconstructing, metaphoric animals (e.g., 'the greedy wolf')-those that are to be decoded as readily as livestock to be butchered. In her essay 'Among All Beasts: Affective Naturalism in Late Medieval England' (a kind of theoretical prologue), Aranye Fradenburg argues that, 'when animals appear, they are never simply symbols for something else; the very feet that they can serve as such is already the sign of our commonality with them' (27). Hardly subservient, animals exist alongside humans in an interdependent, sometimes co-adaptive, earthly community.While too often instrumentalized by Homo sapiens, animals in Chaucer's texts are not, according to these authors, easily reducible to anthropocentric conceptualization and activity; they may, for example, point to what Karl Steel describes as all mortals' shared 'noncapacity...to elude exposure to injury and decay (189). Similarly, the image of 'p roude Bayard' subdued with the lash in book five of Troilus and Criseyde, Carolynn Van Dyke argues, suggests not that Troilus is compelled by erotic impulse but instead that humans (like horses) are vulnerable to an indifferent fortune that puts both on the same plane and thus 'limits human exceptionalism' (110). This is probably for the better, as humans' egotistical objectification of nonhumans' is cousin to other forms of domination-sexist, feudal, theocratic. And as Jeremy Withers reveals about animal imagery in the Knight's Tale, masculine elites seek to naturalize their violence with fallacious notions of nonhuman predators, so that beings like boars and lions doubly suffer, becoming prey and pretext.Of course, Van Dyke reminds us that the horse functions as an idea, not a concrete being, in Troilus. Other authors draw attention to the nonhumans that occupy physical space and interact with humans: the Nun's Priest's protagonist Chauntecleer has real agency, and while we might assume that the rooster figures for a man as in a beast feble, we find, writes Carol Freeman in 'Feathering the Text,' that the narrative privileges Chauntecleer by endowing him not only with more vitality than his marginalized human keeper but also with the desire to live beyond the enclosure that 'protects' him. …