In Hir Corages: Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts
Editor: Carolynn Van Dyke
Article Proposal – “The Black Knight and the Red H(e)art: Chaucer’s Message, Animal Minds, and Human Self-Control in The Book of the Duchess”
Ryan R. Judkins
Ohio State University
(517) 214-0430
Abstract:
Scholars widely accept that Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess is a commemorative and consolatory poem written for John of Gaunt in remembrance of his wife, Blanche, who died from the plague in 1369. Because of the poem’s seeming ambiguity, however, agreement on the work essentially stops there. Some of the primary and most contentious moments in this allegory are the hunting scenes, in which the emperor Octavyen rides to hunt a hart “with strengthe” (par force) and then loses track of it. A long discussion between the Dreamer and the Knight then provides the greater part of the poem, only for the hunt to suddenly reappear with a cacophony of horn blasts and conclude the work. The hunt is thus an integral part of the dream vision, yet its meaning and its relationship to the rest of the poem are never explicitly elaborated. The debate over the meaning of the hunt and the Book of the Duchess as a whole is only spurred on by Chaucer’s challenge to the reader to interpret the dream vision: “So wonderful that never yit,” the Dreamer says about his dream, “Y trowe no man had the wyt / To konne wel my sweven rede / No, not Joseph … / Ne nat skarsly Macrobeus” (ll.277-84).
Unsurprisingly in the face of this challenge, there have been a number of attempts to explain the ambiguous function of the hunt in the piece, from readings of it as a religious allegory in which Octovyen is a numerological representation for Christ (Robertson) to interpretations of the emperor as the Welsh fairy king Arawn (Carson). Certain critics have argued that the hart represents the Black Knight’s lady (Thiébaux, Luisi, Baum), while others have seen the hart as a parallel to the Black Knight (Prior, Tisdale, Scott-Macnab). It is no wonder that scholarship on this text has come up with so many characterizations of the hart and its meaning. The symbolism of the hart in the late medieval period was complex. Philosophical and Christian allegories of deer, from the Physiologus through medieval bestiaries, intersected both with etymological and scientific texts, such as Isidore’s Etymologies and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s Properties of Things, and with the aristocracy’s direct knowledge of the hart and its practices, reflected in hunting manuals, to create a broad but often contradictory discourse. In the bestiaries, the stag might be the symbol of a good Christian who helps his fellows, for instance, while the aristocracy observed the power and beauty of the hart and judged him to be king of the forest. Any or all of these meanings, or ones due solely to literary invention, could overlap in any given text.
A consideration of Chaucer’s audience for this work, the upper aristocracy, however, softens this symbolic cacaphony to a murmur. While the religious and scientific meanings of the hart might have held some sway in John of Gaunt’s mind, it is most likely that Chaucer expected him to characterize the hart through his own direct observations of its behavior while hunting and through the symbolic discourse that surrounded it in hunting literature. As a result, an examination of medieval hunting literature can offer us an explanation for Chaucer’s probable meaning, among other benefits.
According to medieval hunting literature (both manuals such as Master of Game and hunting-rich literary texts such as William of Palerne), the hart was both a bold and timid animal. Edward of Norwich quotes a proverb that states, “After the boar, a doctor, after the hart, a funeral,” and numerous texts give warnings about the hart’s dangerous antlers. Similarly, though, these same texts mention that only a small bone in its heart kept it from collapsing in fear because it was a shy animal and terrified of the dogs and hunters. A strong comparison between male aristocrats and harts focused on the more noble of these qualities. Just as the aristocrat dominated society, the hart dominated the forest, and like a king, it had a crown of antlers. It was larger, more powerful, and more clever than other animals. Richard II probably took the White Hart as his badge because of this association, and it was a common symbol in aristocratic households in tapestries and artwork. The par-force hunt glorified the hart for its strength, speed, and majesty, and hunters displayed ideal aristocratic qualities in overcoming it. Because of how Chaucer characterizes the Black Knight in his grief, the knight seems to embody the second aspect of the hart. The first aspect of the hart was highly valued and intrinsically linked to aristocratic masculine identity, however, and that fact makes the Book of the Duchess into an implicit argument for the Knight (and by extension, John) to overcome his grief and rejoin society.
The comparison between knight and hart raises broader questions about the relationship between humans and animals as Chaucer and this hunting literature saw them, though. If John of Gaunt is supposed to compare the Black Knight to the hart, where would he draw the boundaries? This article finishes by considering the intelligence and agency attributed to harts by medieval hunting texts and arguing that John of Gaunt would have seen the hart as a cunning and intelligent creature, but not one able to govern its desires and terrors, while the Black Knight, as a human, can, and who thus could choose to master his grief and rejoin society. According to these hunting texts, both humans and harts are able to make decisions and manipulate their environments, but only humans can manipulate themselves. Chaucer and this hunting literature thus do not see harts merely as signifiers of anthropocentric meaning without individual characteristics or reality, but instead they carefully attribute significant differences to humans and animals based upon close observation.
Works Cited:
- Baum, Paull F. “Chaucer’s Puns.” PMLA 71.1 (1956): 225-46.
- Benson, Larry D. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
- Carson, K. Angela. “The Sovereignty of Octovyen in the Book of the Duchess.” Annuale Mediaevale 9 (1967): 46-58.
- Luisi, David. “The Hunt Motif in The Book of the Duchess.” English Studies 52.4 (1971): 309-11.
- Prior, Sandra Pierson, “Routhe and Hert-huntyng in the Book of the Duchess.” JEGP 85.1 (1986): 3-19.
- Robertson, Durant W., Jr. “The Historical Setting of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess,” pp. 235-256 in Essays in Medieval Culture, by D.W. Robertson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (Reprinted from 1965 article)
- Scott-Macnab, David. “Polysemy in Middle English embosen and the Hart of The Book of the Duchess.” Leeds Studies in English n.s. 36 (2005): 175-94
- —. “A Re-examination of Octovyen’s Hunt in The Book of the Duchess.” Medium Aevum 56.2 (1987): 183-99.
- Thiébaux, Marcelle. The Stag of the Love: The Chase in Medieval Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.
- Tisdale, Charles P.R. “Boethian ‘hert-huntyng’: The Elegiac Pattern of the Book of the Duchess.” American Benedictine Review 24.3 (1973): 365-80.