Species Or Specious? Authorial Choices and The Parliament of Fowls

Abstract

In the 2006 Biennial Chaucer Lecture for the New Chaucer Society, Susan Crane noted the low status afforded nonhuman creatures in literary and cultural studies and made a compelling case for greater scholarly attention to them.1 In her 2009 monograph From Aesop to Reynard, Jill Mann echoes this exhortation, offering a robust and wide-ranging blueprint for what such a study might comprise.2 Despite this call to attention on behalf of literary beasts and birds, and despite the large number of scholarly articles written on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, I know of no full-length article that specifically addresses the fowls in this text. Yet in this poem in particular, Chaucer’s birds illuminate his choices as a poet; they are fascinating both for what he includes and for what he leaves out. This brief study seeks to address the fowls of the Parliament in three specific contexts: how closely they resemble birds as presented in scientific texts familiar to a fourteenth-century audience, such as those of Isidore of Seville and Bartholomew the Englishman; how they relate to the birds presented in sources and analogues for the poem; and what Chaucer may have invented or observed and recorded, himself, concerning the behaviors and characteristics of birds. Viewed through this approach, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls is not merely an amalgamation of the conventional genres found in his sources—dream vision, bird parliament, and demande d’amour—but a work more inclusive in form and function, with birds at the center of his innovations.