Attending to "Beasts Irrational" in Gower's "Visio Anglie."
- Author/Editor
- Swenson, Haylie.
- Title
- Attending to "Beasts Irrational" in Gower's "Visio Anglie."
- Published
- In Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World, ed. Richard H. Godden et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 163-80.
- Review
- Swenson's chapter works to bridge animal studies and disability studies, two theoretical approaches that are often seen as at odds, given the historical conflation between the disabled body and the animal body as a means to discriminate against disabled bodies--that is, both have often been read as below acceptable norms of full humanity. Swenson reads a similar logic at work in Gower's "Vox Clamantis," particularly the "Visio Anglie," where hierarchies of human value assume the conflation of nobility and ability, most especially in the "Visio"'s presentation of peasants as "beasts irrational." Careful attention to Gower's conflation of these categories, then, points to the needs to attend to nonlinguistic bodies differently. For Gower, the natural order encodes also human hierarchies, along with that of human over animal. Only nobility are fully human in Gower's reckoning, with the commons introduced as "uncounted monsters" even before any physical transformation occurs. The "Visio" oscillates between human and animal, a feature typical of many representations of individuals with cognitive disabilities. Yet in calling readers to behold the peasants/animals who seek acceptance of their humanity, Gower introduces the possibility that this representation may shock readers into seeing new ways of being. Though the "Visio"'s animals are, with one exception, nonlinguistic, it is clear to the narrator that their din means something, and thus his attempts to listen (as well as the reader's) makes space for alternative embodied rhetorics. Thus, Swenson argues, despite Gower's conservative views and class allegiances, the "Visio" provides a perhaps surprising model for both disability and animal studies. [KMcS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Vox Clamantis