Wendy A. Matlock

Kansas State University

Talking Animals, Debating Beasts

This essay contributes to the exploration of animal agency in Chaucer’s works by attending to questions of anthropomorphism, especially talking animals, in debate poems by Geoffrey Chaucer and his successor John Lydgate. My paper will question the assumptions of both medievalists and animal studies scholars, who often disregard the agency of animal characters in beast narratives like Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls and Lydgate’s The Debate of the Horse, the Goose, and the Sheep. Medievalists tend to prioritize the human and overlook or oversimplify the animal qualities of Chaucer and Lydgate’s debating beasts. As a result, animal studies scholars remain unaware of the complex discussions about animal-human relations occurring in medieval literature. Specifically, I examine the speaking creatures in these two Middle English debate poems to uncover how two late medieval authors construct the relationship between man and animal. I propose to explore three questions: what kind of intertext exists between Lydgate’s poem and Chaucer’s, what does a comparison of Chaucer’s and Lydgate’s animals reveal about late medieval assumptions about human superiority over animals, and how have scholars misinterpreted these assumptions?

For centuries, medievalists have regarded John Lydgate as Geoffrey Chaucer’s unsuccessful imitator. But, in the last decade, galvanized by the historicist turn in literary criticism, scholars have returned to Lydgate’s work with fresh interest. Recent studies analyze Lydgate’s connection to Chaucer, his role as a Lancastrian poet, his position as an artist at the vanguard of literary aesthetics, and his status as a public poet, who serves as (in the words of Larry Scanlon and James Simpson) “a point of transmission between often-powerful institutions and their readers.” Lydgate also intervenes in the philosophical debate about the superiority of human nature over animal nature, most especially when he adapts Chaucer’s animal debate form in The Debate of the Horse, the Goose, and the Sheep, one of his most popular short poems, extant in twelve manuscripts and five printed editions made before 1530.

By depicting talking animals, both Chaucer and Lydgate elide the human and the animal. As Jacques Derrida explains in the lectures collected in The Animal That Therefore I Am, philosophers from Aristotle to Lacan ask whether animals have the capacity to speak or reason, a question that privileges the human world view. Derrida asks instead whether animals can suffer, a question whose positive answer unsettles the hierarchy that prioritizes human over animal life. Chaucer and Lydgate disregard the former question and depict beasts that do not just talk but also debate, thus granting their animal characters the capacity for speech and reason, which allows them to frame new questions. The myriad issues they debate raise Derrida’s preferred question as both authors imagine animal experience and view the human from that alternative perspective. The Debate of the Horse, the Goose, and the Sheep, in particular, interrogates animal suffering by expressing the agony horses endure in warfare and examining the ethics of eating goose meat, but both poems reveal commonalities between man and animal and in the process subject categories of difference often understood as “natural” or divinely ordained to negotiation.