Animal Languages in the Middle Ages by Alison Langdon

Author:Alison Langdon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Canacee’s “mewe” is a visual Legend of Good Women, and it is very much like the poetic figure that manifests itself as the walled garden in the Parliament of Fowls and the Roman de la Rose, the temple in the House of Fame , and Christine de Pisan’s Cité des Dames. Like these figures, the “mewe” is “made” and “peynted”—a piece of created artifice. This image may also echo Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s image of house building that Pandarus describes. Canacee and Pandarus build very different things with different outcomes, but both are moved to their building by the inspirational speech of birds, the falcon’s song and Procne’s sorrowful lay being the motivations for these creations, as is the poet’s writing down of the Complaint of Mars after hearing it being sung by the birds. The private songs of these avian lyric poets are thus the cause of public creation and action. While Criseyde’s dream does not exactly fit this formula, the telling of her dream in detail allows public participation from the audience, if not the other characters in the poem, much as the audience “hears” the falcon’s lay that is told privately to Canacee. Her articulated dream takes place in her subconscious, inspired by the nightingale’s unarticulated lay. Chaucer may say that animals and birds “no longer “speke and synge” publicly, as they did in the mythical past of the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” of Chantecleer and Pertelote, but that only seems to mean that most people have lost the ability to make meaning from what they hear them say. This loss may be at the center of the essentially partial nature of human –bird communication; through his constant reminders of the “birdness” of the birds, and the need to put bird speech into terms that humans can understand, Chaucer informs readers that they (and he) can never be a female falcon or hawk or nightingale , and that human concerns and cultural experience will always drive their translation and understanding of “briddes wise.”34 Canacee may understand and even respond in “briddes wise,” but once the story finds its way to the page, it is firmly in “people’s wise,” translated into a discourse (meaning language and context) that humans can understand. It also suggests an inevitable inability to understand the language fully because of the rift between these two worlds, a rift potentially opened by the assumption that animals and birds do not really speak that emerges from the Physiologus and bestiary traditions, which imply that the only functional communication between humans and animals is representational and symbolic . However, the partialness of human understanding suggests the potential fullness of “briddes wise” as a language fully able to investigate, critique, and explore bird society, and implies that through the exchange of emotive experience, these two “wises,” each with its own poiesis, can still exchange energies. “Briddes wise” is thus an inherently poetic language that informs, influences, and awakens creative ability and desire in those privileged enough to hear and interpret it.

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