Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (The New Middle Ages)

Affective Naturalism in Late Medieval England. Trevisa's translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus evinces sadness over the death of dogs and amazement at the ingenuity of spiders; Sir Gawain imagines the terror of a hunted beast; The Second Shepherds' Play reminds us that what we feel for a lamb is much like what we feel for a baby. Similarly, The Parliament of Fowls "affirms the value and pleasure of minds speaking to other minds" 19 across species boundaries, as Chaucer celebrates "the always-already erotopolitical and artful behavior of all creatures great and small" Knowledge gained by observation complements learned lore, as it still does, and empathy is conveyed by many means, among them "habitual gestures, horripilations, fluffings-out, prosody, and language, all of which mingle us, for real" The Parliament attracts several responses.

While Chaucer's eagles debate the intricacies of courtly love, birds lower in the pecking order cry, "Kek kek!

Shrews, Rats, and a Polecat in the ‘Pardoner’s Tale’

Lydgate's poem may read more poignantly than it once did, for the three animals boast of their sufferings to determine which is most serviceable to man. The horse exults in his warlike role, as does the goose whose feathers make the finest arrows. In an unsettling moment, she praises the taste of her own roast flesh, while a ram notes that sheepskin produces soft parchment.

Melissa Ridley Elmes surveys the encyclopedic sources for Chaucer's catalogue of birds, among them Isidore of Seville, Bartholomaeus, and Alan of Lille. In "Species or Specious? Authorial Choices and The Parliament of Fowls ," she shows that he adds many English birds from direct observation, while omitting those not indigenous to the island.

Generic models for the Parliament include the dream vision, the demande d'amour , and earlier bird debates, but Elmes adds a fourth, estates satire, arguing that the Parliament anticipates Chaucer's elaboration of that genre in the General Prologue. His birds, she maintains, "are both species and specious" Ironically, the cuckoo's moral condemnation is voiced by the merlin, a predator that kills far more birds than the cuckoo and her chicks.

Kordecki proposes that Chaucer's debate parodies our tendency to over-classify other creatures and the meanings they hold for us. She skewers the brand of anthropomorphism that either denies all cognition and emotion to nonhumans, or asserts that only humans feel virtuous emotions love, mercy, reverence while other creatures both feel and signify vicious ones greed, cruelty, rage. Pursuing this comparison, Gutmann examines the parallel fates of birds and women. While Chaucer grants his formel eagle at least enough agency to defer her unwanted marriage, the lovesick falcon of "The Squire's Tale" is a pure victim.

Professor of English

She and Canacee "share not only the same sentimental DNA, but also the same cage crafted by the rhetoric of femininity and chivalry" In "The Knight's Tale," we see one of Emelye's rare moments of freedom in Theseus' hunting party--yet Chaucer cuts almost all the details that mark her as a huntress in Boccaccio. Earlier in the poem, Palamon laments that, although man and beast alike are mortal, the beast is happier because he "may al his lust fulfille," whereas man must bridle his passions with moral law.

But the tale belies this claim when it depicts horses literally bridled to serve man's lust, not to mention the tame lions and leopards that frisk around King Emetrius. Just as the relationship of falcon to falconer involves a reciprocal taming, so Canacee and her bird form a sisterly alliance in which their shared gender overcomes their specific difference.

The New Middle Ages | Tanum nettbokhandel

Schotland pleads the value of a feminist ethics of care for animal advocacy, moving from Carol Gilligan's defense of feminine difference to Martha Nussbaum's utopian vision of a world order that extends citizenship to all, regardless of gender, nationality, or species. In fact, since "The Squire's Tale" precedes the Franklin's, we might even say that Dorigen's adventure parodies the falcon's. In asking us to sympathize profoundly with a seduced and abandoned bird while we only smile at Dorigen, whose plight is of her own making, Chaucer--or Stock--pushes the envelope of empathy well beyond its normal bounds.

It would have taken to sheep or goats to produce a Bible, she estimates, and at least 58 calfskins to create the Ellesmere Chaucer. Every beginner in codicology should read her account of the beast within the book: Cultural Primitivism registers the discontent of the civilized with civilization and proclaims that a simpler life, usually seen as a former or "golden" age, is desirable.

My interdisciplinary project disputes the scholarly model posited by Richard Bernheimer in Wild Men in the Middle Ages , which traces the emergence of the competing cultural concepts of "civility" and "primitivism" in Western Europe to a turning point in the late 14c. Using the evidence of of 12 th and 13 th -century French literary texts and visual images, I trace the trajectory of the appearance of and developing medieval attitudes toward the mythic "Wild People," whose "wildness" contributed an antithesis necessary for the West's developing notion of "civilization.

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The second volume, Wild Man or Noble Savage?: The second book is in progress. Stock was featured as a scholarly expert on Arthurian literature and films, in the documentary television program, History VS. King Arthur , evaluating the film King Arthur prod. Antoine Fuqua for its fidelity to the historical and legendary Arthurian tradition and reflection of the historical Middle Ages. Stock was featured as an expert on the cultural contexts of the Crusades for the documentary television program, History VS.

Kingdom of Heaven , evaluating the film Kingdom of Heaven dir.