Proposal to Palgrave Macmillan for edited collection

Title and subtitle: In Hir Corages: Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts

Editor: Carolynn Van Dyke, English Department, Lafayette College, vandykec@lafayette.edu

Brief description

We propose a collection of seventeen essays on Chaucer’s animal agents, informed by recent work in animal studies.

Proposed content; needs to be filled; organization

Beryl Rowland begins Blind Beasts: Chaucer’s Animal World (Kent State U P, 1969) with a curious dismissal of the topic announced in her subtitle. “Chaucer,” she writes, “shows little appreciation of the animal world” (21). As she richly demonstrates, nonhuman animals were important in late-medieval society, and Chaucer accurately reflects contemporary practice and lore. For instance, he “knew as much about the various kinds of horses as most people today know about automobiles” (121). But she argues that he accepted the view of St. Augustine “that it was not important whether certain animals existed or not: what was important was their meaning” (Rowland 4). Although horses were as important as modern cars, she suggests, Chaucer represents them merely as vehicles—both physical conveyances for, and metaphoric correlatives to, his Canterbury pilgrims. Throughout his work, moreover, the nonhuman figures that convey those human meanings came from long established tradition rather than from observation (10-11, 17, 73). Critical history both before and after Rowland’s book reflects little disagreement. Few scholars have explored Chaucer’s representations of nonhuman animals, and those who have seem to share Rowland’s view that he “finds animals interesting not as creatures in themselves but as types illustrative of humanity” (17).

Recent work on Chaucer, notably Peter Travis’s masterful study of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, reminds us that Chaucer’s metaphors rarely subordinate their vehicles strongly or unequivocally to their tenors (Disseminal Chaucer [U of Notre Dame P, 2010), chapter 4, especially 178, 183-9]. Animals are indeed reduced to commodities or semiotic instruments in some medieval documents cited in Blind Beasts, but Rowland’s readings of narrative and poetry—particularly Chaucer’s works, but also some sources and analogues—suggest a more complex semiosis, undermining her dismissive generalizations. That is not surprising, for her generalizations reflect longstanding assumptions: that medieval thinkers drew rigid doctrinal boundaries between human beings and other creatures; that attributions of intention and consciousness to nonhuman animals must be naïvely anthropomorphic, fanciful, or lopsidedly figurative; that all sophisticated thinkers, medieval and modern, reflexively preface “agency” with “human.” Building on recent work in critical animal studies and posthumanism, In Hir Corages will challenge those assumptions.

We take our title from a couplet in the General Prologue that can unsettle anthropocentric assumptions. Before introducing his particular pilgrims, Chaucer sets them within and alongside natural forces. In particular, he rhymes the longing to undertake pilgrimages with the corages of birds, “pricked” by Nature in the spring (GP 10-11). The correspondence proposed by that rhyme might be specified in various ways. For some readers, it suggests a moral and ontological progression, from the carnal urges of animals to human spiritual aspiration. Whereas Nature stimulates the birds, the holy spirit inspires pilgrims. Others read the proposed progression ironically. They take the rhyming of bird corages with pilgrimages to reduce the latter to the former, implying that avowedly pious desires manifest the same vernal stimulation that keeps birds’ eyes open all night. Both readings are widely attested. Those readings are not mutually exclusive: some of Chaucer’s pilgrims seem to be motivated by genuine piety, others by worldly longings, and still others (perhaps most) by some mixture. But something more fundamental than the diversity of human motives links the straight and ironic readings. The two interpretation share the crucial presupposition that governs many studies of Chaucer: that cross-species correspondences, including that between natural “pricking” and spiritual aspiration, refer ultimately to human beings.

The contributors to this volume propose to drop the qualifier. By reversing the anthropocentric assumption, we hope to demonstrate that Chaucer’s ultimate referent is the longings, corages, and actions of beings, including the nonhuman. Corages in the line used for our subtitle has been glossed in strikingly diverse ways, ranging from “feelings (instincts)” through “heart” to “the mind, thought” (Variorum General Prologue II, 1B, 21-2). The same semantic range must attend corage in its frequent uses for human agency. Indeed, Chaucer indicates as much when, a mere ten lines after the couplet about the birds, he rhymes “my pilgyimage” with his own corage (GP 21-2). The critical history of the General Prologue indicates that Chaucer’s open-eyed birds have themselves awakened a good deal of unsatisfied curiosity in his readers. We submit that Chaucer’s own interest was pricked by the corages of those small birds and that in turn, his texts open previously unexplored vistas of nonhuman and interspecies agency.

All of our essays will combine some close reading of Chaucer’s texts with insights drawn from cultural or critical animal studies. Many will employ other medieval materials—encyclopedias, theology and philosophy, scripture, hunting manuals, and poetry and narrative by writers other than Chaucer. Many are informed by gender studies or ecocriticism.

I have listed the authors’ full names and titles on the page 5 of this document. I would be happy to send the collected abstracts of their essays at your request.

I plan to group the seventeen essays into five categories:

I. The material beast

Fradenburg, Freeman, Feinstein-Woodman

Using medieval and modern natural science, the essays in this section argue that Chaucer’s texts present nonhuman animals as material beings. Aranye Fradenburg examines the renewed interest in natural history during the fourteenth century and analyzes the appearance of specific sources in Chaucer’s poetry “whenever the broadening of sentience is being sought.” Carol Freeman explores the material traces of animals in manuscripts, connecting that physical presence to what we learn from the Nun’s Priest’s Tale about the cultural role of animals. Sandy Feinstein and Neal Woodman contrast what was known or believed about vermin to show that the rats and polecat in the Pardoner’s Tale are misrepresented, providing a “convenient fiction serving a murderous motive” even as the teller constructs another self-serving fiction.

II. Animal lessons

Tobienne, Oxendine, Gutmann, Stock

These four essays present animals as docents or models for human characters, providing the collection’s closest approach to the anthropocentric perspective of earlier critics. In all cases, however, the authors emphasize the animals’ role as nonhuman characters in their own right. Francis Tobienne, Jr., argues that Chaucer uses nonhuman animals to warn or admonish, following a “theological rubric” established in the Book of Numbers and employed by other medieval writers. Jessica Oxendine argues that the falcon in the Squire’s Tale uses biblical and other source materials to counter an emphasis on women’s faithlessness in other tales; she concludes that the falcon delivers a salvific warning to Canacee about male deception. Sara Gutmann and Lorraine Kochanske Stock also link birds, particularly falcons, with women. Gutmann traces the gendering of birds and sport in hawking and hunting manuals and argues that the female falcon and eagle in the Squire’s Tale and the Parliament of Fowls present “an option for women to participate [as agents] in the jouissance of the hunt.” Stock pairs the lamenting females in the Squire’s and Franklin’s tales to show that in contrast to the “usual generic beast fable paradigm,” here “the human situation follows and parodies that of the fowls.”

III. Becoming-animal

Schotland, Wang, Roman

Among their other concerns, all ten of the remaining essays probe Chaucer’s representation of species, particularly the ostensible boundary between human and other animals. The three papers in this section identify texts that embrace crossings of that boundary. For Sara Schotland, the  anthropomorphism in The Squire’s Tale constitutes not the subordination of the animal but an “avian hybridity” that enables communication, friendship, and reciprocal care between species, particularly between females. Laura Wang points out that the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale interrogate received ideas not just about gender but also about the natural order; rather than rejecting misogynistic equations of women with livestock or wild animals, the Wife embraces that link and “shows through her ‘experience’ that men and women are in fact equally animal.” In the Book of the Duchess, according to Christopher Roman, animals lead the way out of humanist subjectivity and into a dream world, where the “object of [the characters’] discussion” is the finitude common to all embodied creatures.

IV. Establishing boundaries

Judkins, Withers, Steel

The authors of these three papers explore a retreat from becoming-animal: the reaffirmation in some Chaucerian texts of distinctions between human and animal. Two essays attribute that reassertion of difference to men defined by another kind of boundary, class. Complementing the last paper in the previous section, Ryan Judkins finds in the Book of the Duchess a warning to the Black Knight (and to his extratextual correlative, John of Gaunt) against becoming too much like the hart, a creature often taken to symbolize the power of aristocratic masculinity but also known from observation for occasional timidity and evasiveness. Focusing on the Knight’s Tale, Jeremy Withers also argues that the chivalric class normalized or naturalized its power by claiming “essentialist connections” with animals; at the same time, the chivalric culture represented in the tale exploits and marginalizes actual animals. The essay by Karl  Steel combines the concerns of this section with the natural-scientific orientation of our first group of essays. Steel reads Chaucer’s “Former Age” through technical and polemical texts on pig anatomy and the eating of meat, particularly pigs, seeing in the poem both human animality and “efforts by humans to distinguish themselves from all other animals.”

V. Cross-species discourse

Palmer-Browne, Matlock, Elmes, Kordecki

Our final section takes up the questioning of species boundaries from the other side, asking us to view Chaucer’s speaking birds from their own standpoint. Chauntecleer, for Megan Palmer Browne, perceives himself as a man “without ever losing robust embodiment as a rooster”; thus the Nun’s Priest’s Tale “invites imaginative compassion from its contemporary readers.” Wendy A. Matlock argues that the Parliament of Fowls and John Lydgate’s Debate of the Horse, the Goose, and the Sheep “imagine animal experience and view the human from that alternative perspective,” subjecting assumptions about species difference to negotiation. Species difference is the central topic of the essay by Melissa Ridley Elmes, who uses the Parliament of Fowls to explore the relationship between scientific and socially constructed taxonomy. And Lesley Kordecki suggests that an aviocentric reading of the Parliament of Fowls leads to a revaluation of the cuckoo’s notorious “nest stealing,” and hence to a conception of “commune spede” itself as interspecies nurturance.

I will of course provide an introduction expanding on what I have written here, and I plan to conclude the volume by summarizing and synthesizing such concerns as anthropomorphism, gender, and speciation.

I have also held preliminary discussions with contributors about inviting each of them to provide brief comments to each other’s essays through a blog that I would then organize and edit into a kind of “round-table” appendix. I welcome your reaction to that idea—and, of course, to everything else about the proposal.

Potential contributors and titles.

Elmes, Melissa Ridley. “Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls: Species or Specious?”

Feinstein, Sandra, and Neal Woodman. “Shrews, Rats, and a Polecat in the Pardoner’s Tale.”

Fradenburg, Aranye. “Blessing the Animals.”

Freeman, Carol. “Feathering the Text.”

Gutmann, Sara. “Ascetic Feminism in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Parliament of Fowls.”

Judkins, Ryan R. “The Black Knight and the Red H(e)art: Chaucer’s Message, Animal Minds, and Human Self-Control in the Book of the Duchess.”

Kordecki, Lesley. “Chaucer’s Cuckoo and the Myth of Anthropomorphism.”

Matlock, Wendy. “Talking Animals, Debating Beasts.”

Oxendine, Jessica. “Defending the ‘Kingdom’ in The Squire’s Tale.”

Palmer Browne, Megan. “Chaucer’s Chauntecleer: Speech Fowl and Fair.”

Roman, Christopher. “Contemplating Finitude: Animals in The Book of the Duchess.”

Schotland, Sara. “Avian Hybridity in The Squire’s Tale: What’s Right with Anthropomorphism.”

Steel, Karl . “The Human Pigs of Chaucer’s Former Age.”

Stock, Lorraine. “Foiled by Fowl: The Squire’s Peregrine Falcon and the Franklin’s Dorigen.”

Tobienne, Francis. “Chaucer’s Ass: (non-)human interpretations.”

Wang, Laura. “Reimagining Natural Order in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue.”

Withers, Jeremy.”Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and the Naturalizing of Chivalric Violence.”

Primary and secondary markets

The book will appeal to two primary markets whose intersection has so far been nearly empty: scholarship on Chaucer and medieval animal studies.

The interdiscipline known primarily as animal studies (also as critical animal studies, cultural animal studies, animality studies, human-animal studies, and others) has generated much interest for perhaps twenty years. A bibliography maintained by Michigan State University now includes over 2,000 entries, though at least one section, on literary studies, is recognizably incomplete. Medievalists have been somewhat slow to engage with the new scholarship and discourse but are beginning to show a keen interest in it, particularly in its relationship to the beast fables, bestiaries, iconography, and philosophical and theological traditions with which they have long been familiar. The topic at the most recent Barnard College Medieval and Renaissance Conference was “Humans and Animals in the Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.” The new journal postmedieval (published by Palgrave) is devoting its third issue to “the animal turn.”

Chaucerians have been particularly slow to publish in animal studies, perhaps because of Chaucer’s reputation as a poet of human nature and human society, but interest is growing. Our project was conceived at the 2010 meeting of the New Chaucer Society, where the five sessions in the “Animal Discourses” thread were arguably the most best attended and liveliest. Prominent Chaucerians presenting at those sessions included Susan Crane, Carolyn Dinshaw, Bruce Holsinger, and Sarah Stanbury. Aranye Fradenburg, whose essay will lead off our collection, centered much of her brilliant plenary lecture on perspectives and theories from animal studies. In addition to Professor Fradenburg, five other contributors to In Hir Corages presented work in the animal studies sessions at that conference.

One of those five, Lesley Kordecki, will shortly publish with Palgrave Macmillan the first book since 1969 devoted to Chaucer and animals. Readers of her Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds, along with her essays in Chaucer Review, Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and  ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, will be highly receptive to our volume. So will followers of other contributors who have published in print and on line in this area, notably Karl Steel.

Somewhere between a primary and a secondary market will be Chaucerians and other medievalists, along with early modernists, who want to keep current with new perspectives on their fields. Particularly attractive to many such readers will be our grounding in close reading. Much work in animal studies is heavily theoretical, particularly in the (post)humanities. Indeed, contributions to our volume will be informed by the work of philosophers and theorists; many contributors are younger scholars whose graduate training has immersed them in theory. As indicated earlier in this proposal, we organize the volume around theoretical perspectives rather than according to the Chaucerian texts discussed. But all of the essays respect what Jonathan Culler calls, in introducing the October 2010 issue of PMLA devoted to “Literary Criticism for the Twenty-First Century,” “the singularity of the texts they treat” (125: 909).

Competing Books

Lesley Kordecki’s Ecofeminist Subjectivities, a sustained analysis grounded in ecocriticism, will complement our more varied collection. Beryl Rowland’s Blind Beasts: Chaucer’s Animal World (Kent State U P, 1969)  is old enough to have slipped largely out of view. Moreover, it focuses on the symbolic and instrumental roles of nonhuman animals in Chaucer’s culture and works, in contrast to our approach to animals as agents in their own right. As far as I know, those are the only books devoted to animals in Chaucer. Another possible competitor is Peter Travis’s Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (U of Notre Dame P, 2010), a large, rich study by an eminent Chaucerian. Although it includes an excellent segment on “the animal/human analogies of Chauntecleer’s person” (197), the book focuses less on the animal agents than on rhetoric, genre, and the tale’s roots in medieval pedagogy.

Chaucerians and other medievalists interested in animal studies might consider, as alternatives to In Hir Corages, recent publications with a broader scope. A leading contender would be Jill Mann’s From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford U P, 2009). Mann includes a superb chapter on Chaucer’s birds, but the historical sweep of that book—not to mention its expense—would limit its impact on the market for our own.

Below are other titles that those interested in medieval representations of animals could find useful. The date of ours, and the reputation of Palgrave Macmillan, would indicate, correctly, that In Hir Corages differs from these in responding to the questions of ontology, subjectivity, and gender raised by recent work in animal studies.

Flores, Nona C, ed. Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays. New York: Garland, 1996.

Honegger, Thomas. From Phoenix to Chauntecleer: Medieval English Animal Poetry. Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1996.

Salisbury, Joyce E. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Salter, David. Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2001.

Yamamoto, Dorothy. The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2000.

Ziolkowski, Jan M. Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750-1150. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993.