Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication

The essays in this interdisciplinary volume explore language, broadly construed, as part of the continued interrogation of the boundaries of human and nonhuman animals in the Middle Ages. Uniting a diverse set of emerging and established scholars, Animal Languages questions the assumed medieval distinction between humans and other animals. The chapters point to the wealth of non-human communicative and discursive forms through which animals function both as vehicles for human meaning and as agents of their own, demonstrating the significance of human and non-human interaction in medieval texts, particularly for engaging with the Other. The book ultimately considers the ramifications of deconstructing the medieval anthropocentric view of language for the broader question of human singularity

“The More Things Change: Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Modern Griselda'”

At a pivotal moment in Maria Edgeworth’s 1805 novella “The Modern Griselda,” a party gathers for a reading of “The Clerk’s Tale” at the home of the eponymous character and her husband. In response to Griselda’s vehement indignation at her medieval counterpart’s example, one member of the party comments that perhaps, “if Chaucer had lived in our enlightened times, he would have written a very different Griselda.” On the surface, that would appear to be true—certainly Edgeworth’s tyrannical Griselda seems much more like Chaucer’s Walter. And yet, the “modern” Griselda is herself as much created by the rhetoric of ideal womanhood as is her medieval counterpart, who so wholly embraces the ideal of wifely obedience expounded in medieval conduct manuals that she acquiesces to the apparent murder of her children. So, too, for Edgeworth’s Griselda. In his Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, one of the most popular conduct manuals of Edgeworth’s day, Thomas Gisborne suggests that negative characteristics such as vanity, caprice, and an almost insatiable need for displays of affection—precisely the characteristics this modern Griselda exhibits—stem not from a lack or rejection of desirable feminine virtues but rather a surfeit of them. In fulfilling too completely the ideals of womanhood extolled by their particular cultural milieus, both Chaucer and Edgeworth’s Griseldas become monstrous. This paper explores how Edgeworth’s story engages in the contemporary debates about ideal female conduct and essential feminine nature, particularly as they are manifested in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conduct manuals. In the end, Edgeworth’s revision of the Griselda story belies the listener’s faith in his society’s progressive attitudes toward women

"The Nose Knows: Encountering the Canine in 'Bisclavret'"

Readers are often left baffled by the bizarre retribution Marie de France's werewolf protagonist inflicts upon his treacherous wife: why bite off her nose, specifically? Though critics have offered a range of interpretations for the wife’s punishment in Marie’s lai, approaching the significance of noselessness from a dog’s perspective may deepen our understanding of the poem’s central concerns. In "Bisclavret," the wife’s noselessness is a marker of human failure of perception through her inability to recognize the truth of her husband’s character. It also signifies our overreliance on forms of communication that are much more susceptible to distortion and misrepresentation. Mouths can lie, ears and eyes can be deceived, but the nose cannot

"Na Maria, pretz e fina valors": A New Argument for Female Authorship

The canso attributed to Bietris de Roman participates in conventions that readily accommodate the language of desire within the exchange of political and social fidelity, offering another means by which to reconcile female authorship with a female object of courtly devotion

"My Trouth for to Holde-Allas, Allas!": Dorigen and Honor in the Franklin's Tale

Though the deep and abiding concern with honor that Arveragus and Aurelius evince in the Franklin'sTale have been explored in detail, Doreen’s own preoccupation with honor—no less significant in the tale’s exposition of trouthe—has not received much critical attention. Indeed, the question of Dorigen’s honor is often preempted by analysis of the (masculine) chivalric code of honor, which subsumes female honor within it. Yet an analysis of Dorigen’s promise to Aurelius and of her despairing complaint will reveal that she, too, participates in the same concept of trouthe that binds her male counterparts, one that privileges troth not simply as honor but specifically as public reputation—the esteem others accord a person. While bodily fidelity to her husband is important, indeed crucial to Dorigen, we should not overlook the concern she evinces for verbal fidelity as well, for her dilemma (false though it may be) is predicated on that concern. Ultimately, it is the reputation for such fidelity that matters most—far more so than adherence to any truly moral or ethical code of behavior. It is this reduction of trouthe to repute that leads to the central dilemma in the tale, and leaves readers uneasy with its resolution

La Femme Bisclavret: The Female of the Species?

Conventional humanist readings of Bisclavret approach the lai from an anthropocentric perspective, in which animal nature is merely an allegory for human nature. In such a reading, the werewolf protagonist is a foil for his much more beastly if wholly human wife, with the underlying assumption being that animal nature is something to be rejected. That the marker of Lady Bisclavret\u27s bestial nature—her noselessness—is transmitted through the generations of only female descendants seems to echo medieval antifeminist truisms about female perfidy. However, approaching the lai from a critical animal studies perspective can help dismantle conventional assumptions about the privileged status of the human as well as assumptions regarding gender. I argue that Marie\u27s lai resists not only the human/animal binary but also universalizing antifeminist readings of the wife

La Femme Bisclavret: The Female of the Species?

Conventional humanist readings of Bisclavret approach the lai from an anthropocentric perspective, in which animal nature is merely an allegory for human nature. In such a reading, the werewolf protagonist is a foil for his much more beastly if wholly human wife, with the underlying assumption being that animal nature is something to be rejected. That the marker of Lady Bisclavret\u27s bestial nature—her noselessness—is transmitted through the generations of only female descendants seems to echo medieval antifeminist truisms about female perfidy. However, approaching the lai from a critical animal studies perspective can help dismantle conventional assumptions about the privileged status of the human as well as assumptions regarding gender. I argue that Marie\u27s lai resists not only the human/animal binary but also universalizing antifeminist readings of the wife

Pois dompna s\u27ave/d\u27amar: Na Castellosa\u27s Cansos and Medieval Feminist Scholarship

Despite the rapidly spreading popularity of troubadour poetry throughout Western Europe (to northern France, Italy, Spain, Germany), only in Occitania do we find significant numbers of women poets participating in the tradition alongside their male counterparts-about twenty known by name, with another seventeen mentioned by other medieval writers but whose compositions have evidently been lost.1 Of all the trobairitz, it is Na Castelloza who most closely aligns herself with the self-consciousness of the early troubadours and the self-effacing humility of the troubadour lover in general. 2 she situates her female speaker in the same rhetorical position occupied by the male speaker of the troubadour canso and fully participates in the conventions of the canso genre. One of these generic conventions is the use of feudal metaphors to describe the relationship between speaker and beloved. After a brief discussion of how these feudal metaphors function in the canso as symbolic social capital, I will examine several of the scholarly interpretations of Castelloza\u27s cansos to determine how our own normative expectations of medieval feminine experience have shaped and nuanced our perception of these poems. I shall argue that historicizing the position of Castelloza\u27s speaker with greater precision suggests new ways of perceiving and interpreting women in the Middle Ages