Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New Middle Ages)

Collectively undertaking the first sustained examination of Chaucer's representation of non-human creatures since Beryl Rowland's Blind Beasts in 1971, this book connects work in critical animal studies and close-readings of Chaucer's texts. Grouped under five headings—the material creature, animal lessons, becoming-animal, contested boundaries, and cross-species discourse—the sixteen essays combine various analytical frameworks, from medieval natural science to critical animal studies. The resulting readings enlarge and re-center critical discourse not just about Chaucer's non-human animals but also about his representation of gender, genre, and the place of the human being in the universe of species.

Carolynn Van Dyke is Francis A. March Professor of English at Lafayette College.

Introduction: In Hir Corages: Chaucer and the Animal Real; C.Van Dyke

PART I: THE NATURAL CREATURE

Among All Beasts: Affective Naturalism in Late Medieval England; A.Fradenburg

Feathering the Text; C.Freeman

Shrews, Rats, and a Polecat in ?The Pardoner's Tale; S.Feinstein and N.Woodman

PART II: ANIMAL LESSONS

Chaucer's Chicks: Feminism and Falconry in ?The Knight's Tale, The Squire's Tale, and The Parliament of Fowls; S.Gutmann

Foiled by Fowl: The Squire's Peregrine Falcon and the Franklin's Dorigen; L.K.Stock

That Which Chargeth Not to Say: Animal Imagery in Troilus and Criseyde; C.Van Dyke

PART III: BECOMING-ANIMAL

Avian Hybridity in The Squire's Tale: Uses of Anthropomorphism; S.D.Schotland

Reimagining Natural Order in The Wife of Bath's Prologue; L.Wang

Contemplating Finitude: Animals in The Book of the Duchess; C.Roman

PART IV: CONTESTED BOUNDARIES

Animal Agency, the Law of Kynde and Chaucer's Message in The Book of the Duchess; R.R.Judkins

A beest may al his lust fulfille: Naturalizing Chivalric Violence in Chaucer's Knight's Tale; J.Withers

A Fourteenth-Century Ecology: The Former Age with Dindimus; K.Steel

PART V: CROSS-SPECIES DISCOURSE

Chaucer's Chauntecleer and Animal Morality; M.Palmer Browne

Talking Animals, Debating Beasts; W.A.Matlock

Species or Specious? Authorial Choices in The Parliament of Fowls; M.Ridley Elmes

Chaucer's Cuckoo and the Myth of Anthropomorphism; L.Kordecki

Afterword: Gender, Genre, Genus; C.Van Dyke