“Blessing the Animals” (Aranye Fradenburg)

This essay will review recent scholarship on the role of Franciscanism and Oxford University in rekindling interest in natural history.  Franciscanism became the Vatican’s “positive” response to heresy and dissent, and the essay will consider the idea that the connection between natural science and dissent reappeared, expressed in interestingly different terms, in the latter part of the fourteenth century, along with the appearance of major vernacular translations of “scientific” texts.  The essay will revisit a number of representations of animals in Chaucer’s poetry to demonstrate how and suggest why specific sources appear whenever the broadening of sentience is being sought.