Abstract for In Hir Corages: Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts
FEATHERING THE TEXT
Animals had a daily presence in the lives of medieval readers and writers and their interactions were far more intimate than those experienced in the present era of factory farming and advanced technology. Yet, not only have animals been deemed insignificant or merely symbolic of human values and interests by most critics of medieval writing, but in both their material and representational forms their relations with humans have been undervalued or given only cursory consideration. For instance, scribes have been judged as neither knowing nor caring what species of animal skin they interacted with so closely in the inscribing of texts, while the relationship between Chaucer’s povre wydwe , her sheep and the gentil cok (to whom she has given names) have until now attracted little discussion.
In a twelfth century Latin bestiary, the meaning of animal is said to derive from the Latin animalis meaning ‘the life of animation and the spirit of movement’, an idea that resonates with corages pricked by nature in the Spring―whether those of human or beast―that Chaucer refers to in this prologue to The Canterbury Tales. This essay, then, rethinks the role of animals in the material book, particularly a ‘peculiar operation of agency’[1] they exhibit through their continuing presence as the parchment of the original manuscript and the capacity of these skins to curl and smell; as quill, as ink, as glue; and as creatures who mark, burrow, gnaw, erase and otherwise affect both the book and the text it contains. Holsinger has written of the medieval book as evidence of centuries of animal slaughter, but this essay introduces another response: it attempts to recover the lives of the some of the individual animals whose existence and relationship with humans made possible the communication of Chaucer’s and other medieval works. On the surface of the page, animal bodies speak a language that tells of certain experiences, resemblances, and differences. I even suggest that, where the manuscript’s pages tend to return to the shape of the pigs, goats and sheep they came from, animals ostensibly display what de Certeau calls a ‘tactic’. Indeed, it is as if medieval libraries (and many critics) suppressed the animal by actually and metaphorically chaining books to the shelves. I touch on advances in DNA analysis, particularly phylogeography that could identify not only the species of animal skins used in a manuscript, but where those animals lived and grazed.
In the quiet corners of libraries and museums, silent human connections with the animals that are the book have continued taking place over hundreds of years. This focus on the material book in the essay is interwoven with references to representations of the barnyard in “The Nun’s Priests Tale”: a story that illustrates the roles of animals in medieval culture and gives fleeting indications of how nonhuman animals experience the world and their behavior toward each other, as well as suggesting the nature of their relationship with humans in everyday life.
Carol Freeman
[1] Susan McHugh, “Literary Animal Agents”, PMLA, 124.2 (2009): 487.