Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations.
- Author/Editor
- Warren, Michael J.
- Title
- Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations.
- Published
- Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018.
- Review
- Warren takes an ecocritical approach, seeking "a full exploration of how and why birds mattered in a range of poetic texts from across the Middle Ages"(3), those texts being "The Seafarer," Exeter Book riddles, "The Owl and the Nightingale," "The Parlement of Foules," and the "Confessio Amantis." The latter occupies chapter 5, "Birds' Form: Enabling Desire and Identities in 'Confessio Amantis'" (179-217). His professed concerns lie less with examining birds as emblems or metaphors--the more usual approach to the subject--than with demonstrating that "the sources available to us insist on a more complex history, in which the multitude of native birds observable in England's habitats registered meaningfully in human experiences" (5)--particularly and pointedly in Gower's eyes. Warren finds the "Tale of Tereus" (CA V. 5551-6047) apt ground to illustrate a kind of "hybridity" that he identifies as a characteristically Gowerian gesture, in which birds and humans evince commingled aetiologies, sharply observed: "Ovid's Philomela merely flies to the forest . . . but Gower's is an overtly named species whose habitat, seasonal habits, mellifluous song and elusive nature are described at length" (215). Essentially, following part way Diane Watt and Hugh White, Warren reads the moral lessons of the CA as ambiguous, and building upon those arguments finds in "Tereus" and the poem generally evidence to identify a middle space between simply animal and simply human, one "suggestive and revealing, not simply derogatory and detestable" (202). Ultimately, "Gower's avian-human conformations most overtly demonstrate that medieval conceptions of, and interactions with, the natural world could engage the nonhuman in human interests in ways that accentuate the desirable or necessary presence of the nonhuman" (222). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2018
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis