Medieval Nature Class 6 Parliament of Fowls / Fowles

During our first presentation, we already heard about Susan Crane’s illustration of three principles for making meaning in Bestiaries and in medieval writing about animals more generally: dualist, analogic, and animistic.^[1] The dualist divides the material world from the world of transcendent meaning: the world of flesh from that of spirit, irrational life from rational, mundane from celestial. The analogic connects things through resemblance: the owl’s mournful cry is a harbinger of misfortune or death, and its nocturnal existence similarly foreboding. The animistic recognizes cognition and thus preferences in beings more generally, without neatly dividing things into the rational and mechanistic: here dogs are loyal, not because they have been trained to be loyal, but because they are inherently loyal. A key takeaway: Bestiaries – and I would wager, much of medieval animal writing – operates from this principle of “bricolage,” of making new things from scraps, with no one element taming what Crane calls an “ontological multiplicity” (121). Bestairies are “paratactic,” an and…and..and structure, not subordinating any one system to another. They are irreducible in their meaning systems.

So too for how Crane approached Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles (my preferred spelling) in her “Environmental Thought in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls,” her plenary address to the 2016 New Chaucer Society Congress in London.^[2] In this case, her three systems are dualism, totemism, and animism, similarly irreducible. Chaucer’s encounter with the Dream of Scipio is an encounter with dualism, a neoplatonic invitation to abandon this earth and float on up to the empyrean. A dualist approach to the poem would emphasize its moral lessons for humans and take the birds predominately as stand-ins for human traits, understanding it as teaching, for example, a refusal to abandon oneself to sexual instincts. A totemic approach would emphasize how natural things concretize social hierarchies, which operate variously across human and nonhuman boundaries. Raptors really are better than ducks, and so forth. And an animistic approach, in Crane’s hands, looks at how the trees seem to be enacting their own uses, so that “the shetere ew” (180) seems to be a yew shooting itself, being its own arrow. Dualism here is pushed aside in favor of forms of meaning that combine human and nonhuman, animal and plant, in ways that reach “beyond defining the human as the unique vantage-point from which creation’s inconceivable complexity is reduced into patterns” (25).

I am interested in irreducibility from another, or at least a related angle. I’m interested, as I have been throughout this semester, at how Nature doesn’t work. Let’s take, for example, a key “totemic” moment, the first introduction of the birds:

That is to say, the foules of ravine
Were hyest set, and then the foules smale
That eten, as hem Nature wolde encline,
As worm or thing of which I telle no tale
And water-foul sat lowest in the dale;
But foul that liveth by seed sat on the greene
And that so fele that wonder was to seene. (323-329)

At the top, the birds of prey, there because they eat other birds. This is a hierarchy of domination, familiar from other contexts. Below them, the small birds who eat worms and other repulsive little things. Below them, waterfowl. And then, at once indeterminately hiearchicized and just generally present, the small, seed-eating birds. The hierarchy breaks down almost as soon as it starts.

The next stanza introduces more birds of prey, returning us to order, as do the first several lines of the next stanza, which speaks of the “gentil faucon” (337) and the “sperhawk” (338), and the “merlion” (339) – the falcon defined by its holding fast to the king’s hand, the next two by their preferred prey, the quail and the lark. And then comes a dove, and a swan, and then an owl, followed by a crane, and then a magpie, mixing birds of prey willy-nilly with waterfowl and others. Another system of order has swept in, an aesthetic or moral one, which could admire the dove or swan as much as the falcon. Nature’s order is already too multiple.

Soon the poem splits itself more neatly between higher and lower, the cacophony of calculative birds, and those who insist on choice. The duck says that no choice matters much: “there been mo sterres, God wot, than a paire” (l. 595), to which the “gentil tercelet” (which one?) retorts “that what love is, thou canst nat see ne geese” (l. 602), because love demands something more than calculation. It demands the injustifiable or inexplicable.

And so my other concern is just this, the problem of love and desire. Famously, the Parliament is a poem in which the female eagle begs Nature for another year before she decides on a mate, suggesting that the choice will be delayed perpetually. If it doesn’t happen now, why should it ever happen? Perhaps we weren’t surprised by this, as virtually every encounter we’ve had with Nature so far this semester has been an encounter with disappointment and frustration: Peter Damien’s Nature, Alan of Lille’s, Jean de Meun’s, that of the Roman de Silence, among others, but all these have a Nature generally disappointed because humans, alone among creation, go astray by choosing incorrectly. That is, what wrecks us is precisely our capacity for choice. So too in this case, but with birds: here I am very unfortunately reminded of lyrics from one of Canada’s more dubious exports, Rush, whose song “Freewill” reminds us that “If you choose not to decide / You still have made a choice.” And so it is. You can never opt out entirely.

I have so much more to say about this, and hope we can get to it in our seminar conversation, above all the traditional conflict between rational calculation and love. For now, let me just note that the problem in part is that Nature is a principle of repetition and sameness. Her goal, as Jean de Meun tells us, is to outrace death through a kind of mass or mechanical production of life forms, making the same in perpetuity. Now, we can observe, first, that the locus amoenus our dreamer enters is one where death has no power: “Ne no man may there wexe sek ne old” (207), and if no one can sicken or grow old, what purpose does Nature have at all? Without death, reproduction becomes unnecessary.

And if Nature operates through sameness, then the female eagle’s inability or refusal to settle on any one of the three tercel eagles makes sense: how can they be distinguished? From Nature’s perspective, each is what they are, female eagle and three male eagles, each one noble, one supposedly more noble than the others, but, to my ears, indistinguishably calling out in the standardized language of courtly wooing.

All Nature needs the formel eagle to do is to work with a tercel eagle, no matter which one, to reproduce and thereby carry out Nature’s ends. But once choice enters the picture filled with species – with reproducible types, that is – choice becomes impossible, even perverse, because at once arbitrary, inexplicable, or injustifiable. We just want what we want. Her refusal bears witness to how romantic sexual desire, in its mysterious incalculable particularity, always undermines Nature.

More in conversation including what I have to say about this manuscript take in red: “que bien ayme a tarde oublie”! (and then following “explicit tractatus de congregacione volucrum die Sancti Valentin”) [who loves well forgets slowly; here ends the treatise of the assembly of birds on the Day of Saint Valentine]

“An Ontological Turn for the Medieval Books of Beasts: Environmental Theory from Premodern to Postmodern.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature, ed. Susan McHugh et al, pp. 111-126. 2021. ↑
“” The lytel erthe that here is”: Environmental Thought in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 39, no. 1 (2017): 1-30. ↑