Parliament Of Fowls Research Articles

Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations

Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations

Michael J. Warren, Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018, 259 pp.

Michael J. Warren has written an ecocritical, literary study of birds in medieval English poetry. He emphasizes the “real birds” evoked by literary representations. While he acknowledges the “metaphoric” category of birds, encompassing avian symbolism, allegory, and anthropomorphism in verse, he repeatedly returns to the real qualities of birds known in England and represented in selected poems, paying special attention to The Seafarer, the Exeter Riddles, The Owl and the Nightingale, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, and the stories of human-to-bird transformations in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, particularly those of Alcyone and Ceyx and Tereus, Procne, and Philomela.

Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams by Megan Leitch

Reviewed by: Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams by Megan Leitch Carolyne Larrington megan leitch, Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture 40. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Pp. 284. isbn: 978-1-5261-5110-0. £80.00. This is a lively and thoughtful exploration of a topic that seems to have been unaccountably overlooked in Middle English literary criticism. Dreams, generically [End Page 153] diverse and proto-fictional products of sleep, have been amply investigated without much consideration of the vital human process that is a prerequisite for them. Sleep proves to be remarkably interesting; as signalled by the subtitle, Megan Leitch's book thinks about it in a range of different ways. The book begins with an account of sleep as understood from medical—Galenic—perspectives, as explored in fifteenth-century health regimens. Sleep is understood as a phenomenon that can 'press the reset button,' allowing processes of digestion, humoral rebalance, and consequently, emotional calming to take place. The second chapter investigates the ethical dimensions of sleep. Notable here are the recommendations for 'proper' sleeping. One should sleep on one's side, not propped upright, or heaven forbid, grovelling on the stomach; sleeping position is indicative of the sleeper's moral state. Daytime sleep can be risky: it lays women in romance open to supernatural assault, and even Sir Launcelot, overcome by a desire for sleep in the noonday heat, finds himself captured and imprisoned by a quartet of sorceresses, bent on persuading him to choose one of them as his lover. 'Sloggy slombrynge,' as Chaucer's Parson's Tale characterizes it, signifies serious ethical deficiency, as embodied by Langland's memorable portraits of Sloth and Gluttony. Sleep and its places are everywhere in the canonical texts in Middle English literature. The Pearl -poet's work explores their implications in each of his poems: the disturbing dreams of Belshazzar in Cleanness; Jonah's capacity to sleep as a storm rages around the ship on which he hopes to escape his mission; the extreme mourning that sends the dreamer to sleep in Pearl; and the events in the Hautdesert guest-chamber. Gawain pretends to sleep as the lady slips between his bed-curtains, and his sleep is deeply troubled on the night before he faces his nemesis. Leitch offers many astute and well-argued readings of the meaning of sleep in these texts. The third chapter focuses on sleeping spaces, calling attention to the generic differences between sleep in romance, dream-vision, and fabliau. Leitch develops a persuasive argument that the lack of explicit reference to sexual activity in many Middle English texts is filled by euphemistic reference to private bedchambers. Various versions of the King Horn story, in its Anglo-Norman and English versions, reveal the different treatments of Rymenhild's summons of Horn to her bower, where she declares her love for him, and its aftermath. Sexual desire is thus displaced into spaces of sleep; to contemporary audiences, however, the implications of intimate exchanges in chambers would have been highly visible. Sleeping spaces are not only sites of possible sexual activity, as the many conversations between Pandarus and Troilus in the prince's chamber testify; the bedroom is also a space in which characters can give vent to turbulent emotions, weep, and lament, or, as in Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale, persuade one's bridegroom to convert to Christianity and live chastely. Leitch is careful to note the exceptional nature of such privacy; for royalty and aristocrats, the private quarters contain attendants, who may be confidantes—or spies. In the final chapter Leitch focuses on Chaucer's dream-visions, unpacking The Book of the Duchess and The Legend of Good Women to show how conventions around sleeping and insomnia point to a Chaucerian narrator who needs both healthful sleep and books to compose new works. Though Chaucer discusses Macrobius' theorization [End Page 154] of dreams in The Parliament of Fowls, Leitch makes a compelling case for a parallel Aristotelian understanding of dreams as equally caused by experience in the real world, especially by humoral imbalance. Though Pertelote's common-sense view of...

중세 후기 로맨스 속 사회적 신분과 결혼

During the medieval age, individual choice and marital affection did not seem to have served as the important factors to determine the marriage. Social status and economic factors crucially worked to constrain individual choice. Along with such factors as age and appearance, the issue of social class was described as one of the potentially disabling factors in marriage. In Andreas's De Amore, the focus is given to social class, and the dialogues powerfully assert the importance of social class in relation to love and the problems involved in trying to transcend its division. The issue of love and social class are handled somewhat directly in his work such as The Parliament of Fowls, as well as ironically in The Wife of Bath's Tale. Social class as the most important factor for considering marriage was more emphasized than ever before in the late Middle age, which reflects the social and economic transition from a patriarchal feudalism to a proto-capitalism. As the period wore on, marriage became more 'class-determined' and served as a means for 'class solidarity,' and as a stepping stone for the cohesion of community as well as the harmony of family.

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

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.

Chaucer's Prayers: Writing Christian and Pagan Devotion

Chaucer's Prayers: Writing Christian and Pagan Devotion

"A Familiar Vois and Stevene": Hearing Voices in Chaucer's Dream Visions

This article uses an aurality studies approach to the medieval concept of janglynge, whose semantic meaning ranges from idle chatter to animal noise, to sound out Chaucer's particular attentiveness to the act of listening in his dream visions. While Chaucer's first poem, The Book of the Duchess, illustrates the distinctions between hearing and listening, and highlights different relational dynamics implicit in various modes of listening, the implications of this aural preoccupation for his own poetics emerges most concretely in his two most famous dream visions, The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame, both of which clearly pivot from visual to aural perceptual modes over the course of their narratives. Here Chaucer's engagement with janglynge through The Parliament's bird calls and the acousmatic voices in the House of Rumor highlights his sense of the partiality of his own poetic voice, dependent as it is on the collaboration of his auditor to come into being.

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras by Nancy Bradley Warren

Reviewed by: Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras by Nancy Bradley Warren Kathleen Forni Nancy Bradley Warren. Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. 228. $100.00 cloth; $45.00 paper. It will probably come as little surprise to most readers that Chaucer's ambiguity and malleability regarding orthodoxy and heterodoxy made him a useful figure in "religiopolitical conflicts" in his postmedieval reception. But while Chaucer's Lollard leanings and perceived proto-Protestantism have received abundant critical attention, his association with continental female spirituality in his own age and his role in premodern Catholic counter-tradition polemics have been less studied. Nancy Bradley Warren fills this lacuna in the poet's reception, situating Chaucerian invocation within efforts to "establish religious and national identities on both sides of the Atlantic" (13). Armed with meticulous research and careful close reading, Warren convinces that the political value of the Protestant Chaucer (which I and others have proposed) provides only a partial account of his postmedieval canonization. Using a "transnational and transperiod approach" (13), Warren suggests that Chaucer represented a masculine cultural authority who could "save the English Catholic past from feminization" (4). The pejorative feminine [End Page 457] here is associated with both mystical spiritualism and (surprisingly) vernacular religious texts. While Warren's narrative is not a corrective to those who link his postmedieval canonization to his perceived Wycliffite leanings, Chaucer occasionally emerges as "a figure who masculinizes and rationalizes the English Catholic Middle Ages" (99). Warren maintains that his female monastic pilgrims reveal Chaucer's "awareness of and interest in the emergence of Lollardy—the greatest English religious controversy of his lifetime—as well as his cognizance of the burgeoning visionary, mystical, and prophetic spirituality of Continental holy women" (9). Chapter 1, "Female Spirituality and Religious Controversy in The Canterbury Tales," revisits The Prioress's Prologue and Tale and The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale within the context of the Brigittine spirituality associated with St. Birgitta of Sweden (1349–73), whose revelations emphasize the power of the Virgin Mary and maternal intercession, as well as the efficacy of vernacular religious translation and female spiritual instruction. The Second Nun's Prologue not only emphasizes the power of Mary's virginal maternity but also posits the legitimacy of vernacular translation (the "mother tongue"). And St. Cecilia herself demonstrates that female "conseil" can lead to salvation; as such, the tale nicely "quits" the denigration of womanly counsel found in The Nun's Priest's Tale (which immediately precedes The Second Nun's Tale in the Ellesmere manuscript). Warren rereads The Prioress's Prologue as a reflection of the popular cult of the Virgin Mary in the fourteenth century, and highlights its "salvific power" of maternal suffering and the "the dynamics of Incarnation" (30), providing a layer of sophistication to what is sometimes seen as an infantilizing expostulation. Nonetheless, it is difficult to get around the notorious anti-Semitism of the tale; Warren concurs that the tale of the little "clergeon" lacks some "spiritual and intellectual sophistication," which is perhaps owing to "imperfect religious knowledge, imperfection that could be ameliorated by access to vernacular translations of religious texts" (36, 37). One might add, however, that St. Birgitta's Prophesies and Revelations itself is littered with denigrating references to the Jews—revealing a less salutary aspect of her spirituality, and an aspect of Marian devotion that continues to unsettle. Real nuns also read some Chaucer, or at least texts that mention Chaucer. Chapter 2, "Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers," explores Chaucer's literary legacy as attested to by the manuscripts owned by several prominent English nunneries with [End Page 458] Lancastrian affiliations (Warren meticulously traces the family back-grounds and surprising political connections of the women in these monastic houses). The Brigittine nuns at Syon possessed a miscellany (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 416) that included—in addition to Lydgate's Siege of Thebes and several other texts on ethics, political advice, history, and philosophy—The Parliament of Fowls (or at least lines 1–142 of the poem, since the manuscript...

“Kek kek! kokkow! quek quek!”: The Glorious Cacophony of Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls

Abstract From his initial reading of Macrobius to the bird choir's parting roundel, the narrator of Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls must consider competing versions of love, nature, and human agency, but at the end he remains as uncertain and unresolved as he was at the beginning. Rather than settling the questions with which the poem is concerned, Chaucer, through the waking and dreaming experience of his poetic persona, enacts a psychodynamic interchange in which the ongoing negotiations between experience and authority, flesh and spirit, nature and the divine, are fluid, bidirectional, and mutually dependent. This suggests not only that the condition of embodiment forms the nexus of the poem's various conceptualizations of love, but also the more incisive point that the formulation of any higher good depends on our ability to have clashing ideas “knyt by evene noumbres of acord.”

Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations by Michael J. Warren

Reviewed by: Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations by Michael J. Warren Jenny Smith Warren, Michael J., Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations (Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2018; hardback; pp. 269; 6 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843845089. Combining ornithological and literary history, this book is an important contribution to environmental history and ecocriticism, unpacking the complex relationships between human and other creatures and their shared environments. As Michael Warren points out, 'natural and cultural histories overlap': ornithological knowledge deepens our understanding of birds in medieval and modern culture (pp. 5–6). The five chapters analyse a range of texts chosen to show where 'metaphor and realities fuse and collide' (p. 10), allowing Warren to discuss natural and cultural history together. While 'a full exploration of how and why birds mattered' (p. 3) cannot be achieved in five case studies, other birds in other texts are mentioned throughout, and the choices and analyses bring out five distinct 'ways […] feathered physicality and transformation is embraced […] as part of poetic strategy' (p. 23) in England from the tenth to fifteenth centuries. In turn, each chapter illuminates a different aspect of metaphor. Birds have always been a powerful metaphor for human experience, being both like humans (voice, bipedality) and unlike (flight, feathers). As Warren [End Page 297] notes, medieval thinkers understood metaphor as an interrelation of likeness and unlikeness, making birds as a metaphor a rich study. The book focuses on particular ways birds both resemble and differ from humans, both physically and in social and ecological roles. Adaptability is another characteristic that could usefully have been discussed in a concluding chapter, had scope allowed. Chapter 1 discusses the flight of seabirds in The Seafarer as a metaphor for the pilgrimage of the soul. The argument's originality lies in its construction: Warren shows how the familiar littoral environment and the voices of the seabirds—which recall, but are not, the human voices of the hall—reframe the poem as homecoming, as well as exile (as in the more traditional reading). Chapter 2 explores how disguise and trickery among birds such as the cuckoo and jay illustrate and interrogate the boundaries of knowledge in the riddles of the Exeter Book. The focus on resemblance and illusion, on what we can and cannot know, drives a discussion of metaphor's uses in medieval pedagogy. Chapter 3 considers the (human) values attached to different species, embedded in metaphors like the owl's night-sight for spiritual blindness. In The Owl and the Nightingale, the problematic nature of such metaphors as both inaccurate and harmful to birds (owls are neither blind nor evil) is debated in the birds' own voices. Warren's analysis prompts us to think critically about medieval observation of animal kinds, and about what such observations can tell us about birds and about human–nonhuman relations. Throughout, Warren gives the Old English names of species, grounding the reader's understanding in the primary sources and allowing the non-specialist a richer experience. The cultural specificity of onomatopoeic bird names hints at another form of 'in-betweenness' between the metaphorical and the literal (p. 16). The cultural and linguistic moments embedded in such names could also inform studies of sound, accent, and rhyme, as well as of historical semantics, such as Warren's forthcoming work on birds in place-names. Chapter 4, on Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, explores the limits of language and cross-species translation (translatio being the Latin for Greek metaphora). Like the poet's struggle to express birds' voices in English, mystical language, allegory, and metaphor attempt the impossible. Warren's book asks, and his choice and analysis of texts attempts to show, 'what […] we lose, overlook or misrepresent that […] cannot be transferred' (p. 222). In Chapter 5, literal transformations in Gower's Confessio Amantis enable a discussion of desire and identity across species, recentring the physical in the cultural. This last chapter is for me one of the most striking and successful, as it shows how the metaphor of transformation establishes a more nuanced understanding of the physical and human world. 'In all aspects...

Medieval Gardens: Body, Space, and the Allure of the Locus amoenus

In the literary tradition, the locus amoenus meaning pleasant place, is generally deployed and envisioned as a garden that is idyllic, peaceful, and safe. This place is commonly considered to be a space momentarily frozen in time creating the illusion of eternal bliss. The landscape, however, may not be as innocent as it seems as it bears underlying instances of an insidious nature. Although, for instance, the Garden of Eden is apparently an archetypal garden that is deemed to be pleasant, under the seemingly safe and peaceful surface is also a space wherein gendered bodies are tempted to fall from grace. On the other hand, spaces imbued with mystifyingly sinister aspects do not completely transform into a locus horridus (“fearful place”) their functions go beyond being a simple locus amoenus. This becomes even more evident when we reflect on the placement and/or displacement of bodies within these spaces. By exploring the gardens in canonical medieval narratives, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and the Merchant’s Tale, this article analyses the various functions of the locus amoenus with a specific focus on how certain bodies are perceived within these spaces through the lens of spatial theories.

Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations by Michael J. Warren

Reviewed by: Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations by Michael J. Warren Wendy Matlock Michael J. Warren. Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018. Pp. 269. $99.00. Birds have fascinated medievalists since before the "animal turn"— witness Beryl Rowland's Birds with Human Souls (1978)—and monographs on the subject have proliferated since scholars such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Gillian Rudd, and Dorothy Yamamoto invited us to engage with nature. Michael J. Warren's Birds in Medieval English Poetry is a welcome addition to such scholarship. Warren is familiar with theoretical work by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and well-versed in ornithology, but his argument relies on careful and nuanced close readings of five early English poems. Warren maintains that birds in these poems cannot be read as purely metaphorical, and so scholars must attend to how they reveal real birds in ways that "hint at diverse, interpenetrating orientations" where "natural and cultural histories overlap, reciprocate and interweave" (5). After an introduction, Warren focuses each chapter around a central poetic work: (1) The Seafarer, (2) the Exeter Book Riddles, (3) The Owl and the Nightingale, (4) Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, and (5) the "Tale of Tereus" in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Reveling in contact between human and avian, between bodies and thought, and between science and art, Birds in Medieval English Poetry attends to both allegorical figuration and natural philosophy to argue [End Page 436] that because birds resist categorization with their penchant for transformation via flight, migration, molting, singing, and oviparous reproduction, they are "crucial to the potentialities, effects and limitations" of human imagination and experience (18). As Warren explains near the end of the Chaucer chapter, "If animal imagery has long been understood as casting the nonhuman in human terms in order to explore human matters, sometimes we catch something of the animal terms, too, reversing our attempts to superimpose so that some of what we intend for the human tenor … rubs off on the feathered vehicle" (175). In essence, Warren enacts the Nightingale's reminder that fables are never completely fictional (line 128 in The Owl and the Nightingale), taking medieval ornithology seriously while also giving due diligence to medieval secular and religious concerns and to modern scholarly debates. Chapter 1 begins with Bede's story of the sparrow from the Historia ecclesiastica to establish a connection between bird and soul in biblical and Anglo-Saxon allegory that is relevant for understanding The Seafarer: "As in the famous sparrow analogy, we encounter the same fluctuations between hall-life and the daunting outside world, the mind that weighs up the two in opposition, and birds that are associated with both these worlds" (28). This foundation allows Warren to read the poem as a unified whole, whereby "a curious avian materiality" inhabits both the naming of seabirds in the ocean setting at the beginning of the poem and the figure of the lone-flier that marks the turn from seascape to contemptus mundi (29). Attending to bird habits and habitations, Warren reads both passages as simultaneously "factual and figurative," so that the obscurity of the afterlife inheres in the acknowledgment that birds cannot replace human companions in the first passage (63). Literal and figurative modes converge to reveal that the deprivation and loneliness of embodied physical journeying prepare the speaker for a posthumous unknown. Building on observations about avian foreignness, Chapter 2 argues that "in being both nameable and anonymous [birds] suit riddles' tendencies to obfuscate and disambiguate concurrently" (66). When combined with the lack of solutions in the Exeter manuscript, the swan (Riddle 7), the barnacle goose (Riddle 24), the jay (Riddle 8), the elusive Riddle 57, and especially the fingers and quill of Riddle 51, for Warren, "encourage willingness to admit uncertainties, to recognize but not circumscribe the web of sprawling, inclusive contiguities between animate [End Page 437] and inanimate individuals" (84). Birds, like riddles, then, inspire wonder and irresolution. The Owl and the Nightingale, subject of Chapter 3, depicts a famously unresolved debate, and Warren offers new insight into how the poem intertwines "the natural...

Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy. Kellie Robertson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. ix+443.

<i>Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy</i>. Kellie Robertson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. ix+443.

"The lytel erthe that here is": Environmental Thought in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls

"The lytel erthe that here is": Environmental Thought in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls

Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction by David Wallace

Reviewed by: Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction by David Wallace Megan E. Murton David Wallace. Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 172. $19.95. David Wallace's Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction lives up to its name in inviting its readers to look anew at Chaucer, seeing in him not the founding father of English letters but "the poet of an unfinished Englishness" (142). Wallace shows how Chaucer's Middle English absorbs influences ranging from scientific treatises to "urban noise" (44) to become a capacious and flexible poetic medium. The experimental quality of Chaucer's language is, Wallace proposes, a reason why his works are enjoying a far-reaching appeal now, in a world where English has become dominant. Wallace's dual focus on language and global reception makes his book a thought-provoking read that not only introduces its audience to Chaucer's writings but also demonstrates their present-day significance and vitality. The introductory chapter, "Beginnings," covers both theoretical and contextual ground. It opens with a discussion of audience and persona, concepts Wallace presents as integral to Chaucer's art and to current criticism of it. The chapter then shifts, via Terry Eagleton's description of Chaucer as a "class traitor" (10), to an overview of the poet's life and times. The thesis here is that Chaucer was "first and foremost a European" (12), a claim that Wallace, of all Chaucerians, is ideally suited to expound and defend. He first makes a compelling and admirably condensed case for Chaucer's continental focus, and then vindicates the cosmopolitanism of the Middle Ages more broadly. The chapter ends with a section on war as the dark underside of the interconnected medieval world. Insightful references to Chaucer's writings are sprinkled throughout the introductory chapter, but more developed readings begin in the second, "Schoolrooms, Science, Female Intuition." This is one of two thematic chapters that bracket a more or less chronological tour of Chaucer's writings in the book's middle three chapters. This structure is complex but effective, as it allows Wallace to trace both Chaucer's recurrent engagement with certain topics and his trajectory of development as a poet. The second chapter examines Chaucer's interest in ways of knowing. After a brief overview of Scholasticism and exegesis, Wallace describes Chaucer's scientific expertise and his readiness to make fun of it; The [End Page 387] House of Fame, for instance, is "perched somewhere between science and farce" (33). The chapter then pivots to the relationship between women and Latinate intellectual culture, introducing the Wife of Bath as "a tissue of … anti-feminist texts" (36) and then, in the space of a few pages, examining gendered presentations of knowledge in The Nun's Priest's Tale, The Second Nun's Tale, The Merchant's Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, and The House of Fame, with references to As You Like It and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight along the way. This section is typical of the book as a whole in the expert way in which it charts a path through Chaucer's writings while referencing other medieval poems and later works of English literature. The chapter concludes with the claim that, for Chaucer, "women are different" (42) in a specifically epistemological sense. Readers who are familiar with Chaucer criticism will appreciate this chapter's illuminating perspective on his treatment of gender. The third chapter, "A Life in Poetry," begins the chronological section of the book. Living in a world where "'English poetry' was a contradiction in terms," Chaucer "aspires to" this label in his early works (43). The chapter examines how this aspiration leads Chaucer to learn from French models and then Italian ones, though Wallace cautions that French and Italian do not represent fully distinct creative phases. The core of the chapter discusses Machaut alongside The Book of the Duchess and Dante alongside The House of Fame. The conclusion focuses on The Parliament of Fowls as a case study in Chaucer's response to Italian metrics, which Wallace describes as a "liberatory" influence that may have led Chaucer to invent rhyme royal (57). Rhyme royal provides a transition...

Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin

Reviewed by: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin Jeffery G. Stoyanoff Steele Nowlin. Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. Pp. 234. $99.95. Steele Nowlin's discussion of invention through a reconceptualization of affect is a groundbreaking study that marks a shift in our understanding of and approach to two of the most important authors in Middle English: Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. Nowlin examines how Chaucer and Gower "present invention as an affective force, a process characterized by emergence and potentiality" (1). Nowlin's affect is not one of emotion. It is "an intensity … typically described in a critical vocabulary of movement, emergence, and becoming" (1). He also [End Page 374] broadens the definition of invention to one "that includes the dynamism and sense of potential that characterize inventional activity" (2). He clearly illustrates this relationship between affect and invention with an analysis of two cases of "paralyzed dreaming narrators": in Chaucer's The Parliament of Fowls and Gower's Vox clamantis (2). In both cases, the narrators' emotions manifest themselves in actions that lead to the creation of poetry: what Nowlin calls "the affect of invention" (12). In the remainder of the introduction, Nowlin provides an excellent overview of the scholarship on both invention and affect in medieval studies. His discussion of affect theory (13–17) explains his own contribution to this discourse within medieval studies as well as how he brings this contribution to bear on the idea of invention (17–18). In so doing, Nowlin deftly addresses a number of primary and secondary texts on invention in medieval studies (18–28). He concludes the introduction by coming back to Chaucer and Gower, again reiterating that "examining the ways in which aesthetic productions emerge through processes of invention… creates ways in which poetry can intervene in the discursive constructions of reality that exist outside of poetic worlds" (28). Whether or not intentional, Nowlin's chapters each follow this emergent process, which he argues is vital to the works of Chaucer and Gower, with each chapter stemming from the affect of the prior. In Chapter 1, Nowlin explores the conceit of invention as movement in Chaucer's House of Fame. Nowlin emphasizes the abundance of movement in the proem to Book I, noting that it is "the primary conceptual framework" within the poem that sets the stage for its "examination of invention as movement" (40). He directs our attention to how the proem presents "dreams as affective forces" (40) and adds that the movement produced from these forces essentially displaces feeling. He marks the poem's emphasis on "engynes and gynnynges" as thought before likening "tydynges" as depicted in Book III's House of Rumor to images in the imagination (42–43). Referring to Chaucer's "motional quality of imagination" (43), Nowlin then demonstrates that tydynges are actually "inventional gynnynges" (50). The meticulousness with which Nowlin presents this argument, marrying the theoretical so well with the textual apparatus that Chaucer employs, is admirable. The analysis he provides of Book III to demonstrate invention as "a process of moving and becoming" is delightful (55), particularly his discussion of the eagle's speech (56–58), which adds an impressive and ultimately more productive interpretation of this moment in the poem to the existing readings. [End Page 375] Towards the end of the chapter, Nowlin discusses the poem's treatment of Dido as a potential inventor, which results in Geffrey appropriating her invention as his own, participating in the "misogynistic trope of masculinist invention" (68). Chapter 2 emerges from this unresolved question of gender and invention left at the end of Chapter 1. "The Legend of Good Women," contends Nowlin, "… actively work[s] to trigger in readers a sudden awareness of the pervasiveness of cultural constructions of gender and power" (69). He calls Legend "Chaucer's fullest narrative treatise on the affect of invention" and asserts it is an effort "to destabilize the antifeminist literary and cultural traditions its narratives would seem to represent" (73). Nowlin points out the impossibility for any poem to represent the affect of invention directly in a...

From Phoenix to Chauntecleer: Medieval English Animal Poetry by Thomas Honegger

REVIEWS THOMAS HONEGGER. From Phoenix to Chauntecleer: Medieval English Animal Poetry. Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten/Swiss Studies in English, vol.120.Ti.ibingen, Basil: A.Francke Verlag, 1996.Pp.ix, 288.N.p. There have been any number of studies of medieval English literature dealing with animals and its Latin, French, or Italian background, but no examination concentrating exclusively on the major functions of the animal figures in the chief examples of medieval English animal poetry. It is such a task that Thomas Honegger has set himself in this disserta­ tion, completed at the University of Zurich.His monograph provides the reader with a wealth of information for understanding the role played by animals in the Physiologus tradition in Old and Middle English (chapter 2); in "bird poems" from The Owl and the Nightingale to Chaucer's The Parliament of Fowls (chapter 3); and in two Middle English beast fables/epics, The Vox andthe Wolfand Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale (chapter 4). Honegger's extensive study of the Physiologus tradition (pp.17-100) proceeds along structuralist lines, developing a model of an "ideal" chap­ ter from Latin representatives of the Physiologus that serves as a point of reference for his analysis of the Old and Middle English texts in this grouping.Such a typical chapter begins its presentation of an animal with a biblical citation that mentions that animal explicitly, develops "scientific" data about the animal adopted from natural history in a first section, then interprets these characteristics s piritually and allegorically in the next section, and concludes with a brief statement of affirmation ("And so the Physiologus has spoken well concerning ... ").Honegger's analysis of The Old English Physiologus concludes that the structure of its entries recapitulates this model, though generally without the explicit citation of a biblical verse at the beginning and with a more extensive moralizing epilogue.The function of the animals in the Old English text remains that of providing an occasion for the significatio: only those char­ acteristics that support a consistent spiritual interpretation of the ani­ mal are mentioned in the section of "scientific" data.It is on structural grounds as well that Honegger justifies his analysis of The Phoenix here, for the implicit division in this poem between a section of characteris­ tics of the phoenix derived from natural history and one devoted to the eschatological and typological signification of these characteristics par­ allels the model he has developed of the typical chapter in the Physiologus 255 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tradition. Unlike its Old English precursor, The Middle English Physiologus demonstrates an increased interest in the sensus moralis in its interpretation ofanimal characteristics. As Honegger emphasizes in par­ ticular in his analysis of the chapter on the dove in The Middle English Physiologus (which has no equivalent in the Theobaldi "Physiologus" that served as the Latin source for most of the English work), moral inter­ pretation is the characteristic method ofsignificatio in the Middle English text. Ofthe uses ofanimals in secular Middle English literature, Honegger is concerned mainly with two traditions: that which employs the alle­ gorical and symbolic (and generally courtly) dimensions ofanimal char­ acteristics on the one hand (pp. 103-66), and the genres ofthe beast epic and beast fable on the other (pp. 169-227). Symbolic qualities of ani­ mals are used in a number ofMiddle English genres, such as political po­ etry like Mum and the Sothsegger (identified here by its outdated title, Richard the Rede/es, and erroneously attributed to William Langland [p. 10}), but the examples in this tradition analyzed by Honegger, in which animals play a major role, generally involve questions oflove and frequently employ the debate form. Although that form regularly pre­ sents the question ofthe animals' usefulness to human beings as the piv­ otal point of the debate, the author of The Owl and the Nightingale ini­ tially frustrates this expectation, reminding the reader frequently of the avian nature of the debate's protagonists instead. In Honegger's under­ standing, the shifting nature of the symbolic reading the birds give of each other-the owl attempts to identify itselfwith the nycticorax tradi­ tion, for example, while the nightingale attempts...

Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems by A.J. Minnis, V.J. Scattergood and J. J. Smith

REVIEWS A.J. MINNIS with V.J. SCATTERGOOD and J. J. SMITH. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 578. $72.00. Compared to its predecessors (Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales (1989}; Barry Windeatt, Troilus andCriseyde (1992}), this third and last volume of the Oxford Guides to Chaucer (OGC) is heftier (578 pages, vs. 437 for the Tales and 414 for the Troilus), and, more significantly, it brings the series very much into the 1990s in critical style as well as date. A. J. Minnis's discussions of The Book ofthe Duchess (BD), The House ofFame(HF), The Parliament ofFowls (PF), and The LegendofGood Women (LGW) adopt a personal, often tendentious voice and undertake to en­ gage aggressively many of the critical issues and perspectives that have entered, and to a great extent transformed, Chaucer criticism during the last 20 years. (By contrast, the appended survey of the lyrics by V. J. Scattergood does not overtly manifest Minnis's concern "to consider the ideological implications of various readings" of Chaucer's poetry [p. 1}.) Responding positively (if not without some ambivalence) to the evo­ lution of the "New Historicism," Minnis offers his "readings of Chaucer's love-visions within an anthropology of courtly didacticism and play and as inscriptions of aristocratic ideals of conduct and processes of cultural fashioning" (p. 4), while resisting the notion that Chaucer is to be understood exclusively "as occupying the position of sophisticated princepleaser"-an understanding that runs counter to Minnis's "identifications of certain prospects of dissidence in Chaucerian fiction," specifically with respect to "aristocratic mores, tra­ ditional misogyny, [or} authoritarian literary theory" (p. 5). Overall, Minnis rejects attempts to read the dream-poems in ways that he regards as anachronistic or overly generalized. He has no pa­ tience with the Robertsonian, allegorizing school (Chaucer, to him, is clearly a secular poet who avoids opportunities to allegorize, as when he borrows details for his version of the Ceyx and Alcyone story in BD from the Ovide moralise, but avoids its moralitas). And in at least partial op­ position to feminist critiques of the representation of women in the dream poems, he aims at "a historicized gender criticism which at­ tempts to respect the room for dissent which the culture of Chaucer's day allowed, in so far as that can be recuperated by recourse to such ev­ idence as is available to us" (p. 5). (To this end, Minnis distinguishes between the "structural antifeminism" of late medieval European civi­ lization, by which Chaucer could not avoid being somewhat affected, 275 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER and "phobic antifeminism," that special animosity most characteristic of clerics, from which he largely absolves the poet [see pp.427-32}.) Two introductory chapters locate the dream-poems with respect to vernacular literary traditions and the social ideologies of Chaucer's au­ dience."The Shorter Poems: Social and Cultural Contexts" offers an ex­ cellent summary of recent theorizing about Chaucer's social and profes­ sional placement and its impact on his poetic development. Minnis argues for the crucial influence of the "international [i. e. , French-based} court culture," promoted by Edward III and Richard II, both on Chaucer's poetic formation and on the "receptive company of courtiers who shared an interest in poetry and a highly personal and earnest piety" (p.19)-the so-called "Lollard Knights" who collectively estab­ lish a "horizontal axis [on which} may be sought the audience of Chaucer's courtly poetry" (p.22 ). "Chaucer and the Love-Vision Form" first examines the ambiguous, often indeterminate dream taxonomies of Chaucer's heritage and demonstrates how his dream-poems reproduce and exploit the ambigu­ ities of significance and interpretation associated with dreams.In the second part of this chapter, dedicated to the analogously complex issue of fin' amors, Minnis considers "the implications of the conventions of courtly love for the construction of gender" (p.60).Responding to the spate of recent analyses-singled out are those of R. Howard Bloch, Maud Ellmann, and Elaine Tuttle Hansen-that depict courtly love as a "patriarchal conspiracy" (p.67), Minnis argues that such judgments, while obviously valid in part, ultimately constitute...

A Moral Garden “Out of Olde Feldes”: Deallegorized Virtue in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls

A Moral Garden “Out of Olde Feldes”: Deallegorized Virtue in Chaucer’s <i>Parliament of Fowls</i>

Noise, Soundplay, and Langland’s Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif

Noise, Soundplay, and Langland’s Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif Adin E. Lears The two elements of subconscious association which form the basis for lyrical melos and opsis respectively have never been given names. We may call them, if the terms are thought dignified enough, babble and doodle. In babble, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and puns develop out of sound-associations. Northrop Frye1 In all versions of Piers Plowman, the poem’s opening lines stress hearing before vision. Will, the Dreamer, sets out on his spiritual quest in early summer, dressed in the rough woolen garments of a hermit. Equipped in this way, he “[Goes] forth in the world wondres to here, / And say many selles and selkouthe thynges.”2 Hearing receives emphasis again at the close of the Prologue, when the last lines devolve into a cacophony of street songs sung by the urban tradesmen and professionals that populate the end of Will’s dream. Piers Plowman draws on and reworks the dream-vision topos of birds lulling a dreamer to sleep (or, in the case of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, waking him up), in any number of places, including in the first dream, when Will falls asleep at the sound of rushing water that “sweye[s] so murye” (A Prol. 10; B Prol. 10), or later on when he confesses that “Blisse of þe briddes abide [End Page 165] me made / . . . Murþe of hire mouþes made me þer to slepe” (B VIII.64–67; C X.63–66; variation appears in A IX.58). In a poem whose genre depends on its narrative of vision, this emphasis on hearing is somewhat surprising.3 It invites us both to attend more closely to what Langland might have to say about the sense of hearing and to listen more ardently to the sounds of his own poetry. In stressing sounds the way it does, the poem figures Will’s pilgrimage for moral and spiritual truth as a process of hearing what the world has to tell him, alongside, even before, seeing its marvels. More pointedly, Will’s early assertion that he is setting out “to hear wonders” suggests that the condition of hearing without knowing exactly or understanding completely is important to the poem. This emphasis on wonder thus underscores a distinction between hearing what people have to say and hearing how they say it. This hearing-how—the process of listening, and not necessarily its end result, comprehending—is an important and as yet unacknowledged means of approaching spiritual knowledge in Piers Plowman. As the emerging field of sound studies has highlighted, historical narratives pitting the “Dark Ages” against the “Enlightenment” have long emphasized visual paradigms for knowledge and understanding.4 This persistent habit of thought has led scholars largely to overlook sound, noise, and hearing in their investigations of medieval sensory epistemologies.5 Yet hearing receives emphasis in any number of biblical episodes and religious sermons commonly recounted and glossed in the Middle Ages. The story of Pentecost, for example, narrates how the apostles perceive [End Page 166] God’s voice by hearing a sudden disembodied sound, which ultimately kindles them with tongues of flame and authorizes them to preach the Word. Similarly, Paul asserts in his letter to the Romans that “faith comes from what is heard.”6 These and other texts laid the groundwork for the importance of sound and listening in medieval devotional culture. Moreover, the study of hearing is inextricably tied to investigations of feeling: both as sensation and as emotion. Sound studies has emphasized the particular synaesthetic capacity of sound and its tendency toward “traversal and transference” with other senses, especially the sense of touch.7 Middle English verbs such as clateren—“to clatter, rattle, resound,” but also “to beat or batter”—remind us that to hear is to feel sonic vibration.8 Moreover, sounds stir feelings, affecting emotions. For the mystic Richard Rolle, whose eremitic way of life has been seen as a precursor to that of Langland’s Will, heavenly sounds (canor) kindle a “fire of love” (incendium amoris) for God.9 I argue that the study of sound proves useful in thinking about...