Jeremy Withers

Jeremy.R.Withers@medaille.edu

“Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and the Naturalizing of Chivalric Violence”

From Nazi attempts at “naturalizing” the state of warfare to modern marketer’s penchant for associating products with the “purity” and “simplicity” of nature, efforts to show how an object, behavior, or ideology finds its parallel in the natural world are rampant. Similar to how contemporary advertisers and warmongers appropriate nature to normalize their bellicosity or their products, the professional military class of Geoffrey Chaucer’s time is exposed in his Knight’s Tale as indulging in ideological appropriations of nature. But rather than defend such practices, Chaucer, I argue, is deeply interested in critiquing the ways in which the chivalric class of his era “naturalizes” their acts of violence and defends their inalienable right to discharge violence by affirming essentialist connections between themselves and animals. However, at the same time that warriors in The Knight’s Tale appear to be deeply concerned with the natural world (a concern demonstrated in chivalric culture by the omnipresence of animals in such cultural practices as heraldry and maintenance badges), Chaucer shows us that the chivalric class’ interest in animals is deplorably one-sided.  Due to this knightly interest in animals being fueled by self-interest and a desire to protect a monopoly on violence, the materially existing animals of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, rarely, if ever, benefit from their prominent role in chivalric pageantry, discourse, and semiotics. Instead, the poem repeatedly depicts actual animals as being marginalized or treated as expendable resources that can always be sacrificed for the larger goal of benefiting and glorifying knights.  In short, what this essay will do is draw upon theories of the social constructions of nature (such as those of Neil Evernden) as well as recent work in medieval animal studies (by such scholars as Lisa J. Kiser and Karl Steel) and provide new ways of reading the animal imagery of the Knight’s Tale, a facet of the poem that has not been much studied since Dorothy Yamamoto’s study of the tale’s animal imagery in her now decade-old study The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (2000).