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Abstract
Despite the conservative programs of John Lydgate’s and Robert Henryson’s fifteenth-century retellings of the “cock and jewel” fable, these texts find ways to provoke both their own audiences and us as modern readers. This essay will demonstrate that the fable’s provocations reveal themselves in the quotidian vocality of the medieval chicken yard. The soundscape of this space attunes the poetic audience to variations in the pace of rime royal, and this complex pacing draws out new meanings of the fabular moral. When read in terms of poultry sound, both Henryson and Lydgate’s verses provoke readers to negotiate nuances of relation between individual experience and generalities of convention in formulating an understanding of value.
Notes
1. The Nun’s Priest’s revision of the fable is “specially and rather self-consciously created only in Chaucer’s version of this exemplum”; in all cases, as Wheatley notes, characters find wisdom but also something that they would rather not find. See Wheatley on the conservatism of Lydgate’s fables (Citation2000, 109, 125, 126). For Wheatley, the fifteenth century falls short of Chaucer’s ingenuity, instead choosing a strategy of amplificatio that represents a “relatively straightforward form” of commentary rather than an attempt to problematize the relation of text and commentary.
2. This fable appeared late in the Phaedrus but was moved to the beginning of the Romulus vulgaris.
3. To some degree, this is a version of “activist formalism”; see Marjorie Levinson’s invocation of Susan J. Wolfson’s use of this term (Levinson Citation2007, 559; Wolfson Citation2000, 1–16).
4. See Wheatley Citation2000, 130, on “natural allegory.” On allegory and bird/human translation, see Warren Citation2016, 128–32.
5. On chickens’ preference for dust bathing in sand, see Villagrá et al. (Citation2014; 72, 73). What Nicolette Zeeman refers to as Chauntecleer’s “polygamy, incest, [and] taste for the younger chicken” are all standard components of flock dynamic and breeding practice (Citation2007, 178).
6. Benson Citation1987, 259; subsequent citations in text by line number.
7. Beyond the information that Henryson was a notary public and a schoolmaster in Dunfermline during the third quarter of the fifteenth century, we do not have much biographical detail concerning him (Laing Citation1865, xiii–xiv).
8. Parkinson Citation2010, l. 495–508; subsequent citations in text by line number.
9. Reproduced with permission of the author.
10. Reproduced with permission of the author.
11. See, for instance, the savage deaths by scalding in Equitan, as well as numerous tyrannized women such as those in Laüstic and Yonec (two bird-related lais). When I asked permission to use her post, Talithahorse revealed that she has participated in medieval reenactments and has researched the Middle Ages for its uses of equines.
12. Nolan goes on to discuss the text’s creation of an “experience of expressive fullness” not through the exhaustive recording of manifold details but rather through rhetorical focus on specific details (Citation2017, 126, emphasis in original).
13. See Mann (Citation2009, 252) on the cock as a medieval figure for the preacher.
14. Thompson (Citation2004, 1–2, 325) in turn revises Murray Schafer’s definition of the term soundscape (Schafer Citation1994, 274–75) by invoking Alain Corbin. Corbin foregrounds human perception of, and response to, an auditory setting as implicit to the concept of “aural landscape” (Corbin Citation1998, ix). Building upon this idea, Thompson elaborates that a soundscape “has more to do with civilization than with nature” (Citation2004, 2). See also Emma Dillon’s (Citation2012) discussion of soundscape in a specifically medieval context.
15. Lydgate also uses abreiden to describe the caught bird in The Churl and the Bird (MacCracken Citation1934, 472, l. 83). There as well, it rhymes with “sayde” (l. 84).
16. The Golden Spangled Hamburg, another heritage breed that exists in bantam form (though larger than the Sebright), was once argued to be Chauntecleer and Pertelote’s breed in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Boone Citation1949, 80).
17. The article by Flink et al. suggests that certain characteristics have developed over the past few hundred years. For example, a gene for hormone regulation (related to the chicken’s daily light exposure and a possible desire to select for “the absence of strict seasonal reproduction”) seems to occur with only intermediate frequency until the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries, so only within the last 500 years and possibly associated with industrialization (Flink et al. Citation2014, 6186). A related narrative obtains regarding yellow skin, though in that instance it appears that some breeds frequently exhibited yellow skin by the seventeenth century while many others did not (6187). See also their speculation about secondary introduction specifically into the UK during the Middle Ages (6187).
18. This formulation, including Culler’s engagement with Northrop Frye, involves the scene of a poetic speaker turning to or away from an audience. Soundscape, by contrast, immerses from all directions.
19. In broader methodological terms, we might invoke here the contrast Yopie Prins draws between reading with the eye (in the New Critical practice of I. A. Richards) and reading with the ear (even when that experience is broken up or interrupted). While the former tends to assume reading as a solitary practice, the latter might have the potential to expand into other kinds of historical settings. One advantage of working in the Middle Ages is that this duality of visual and aural reading, as well as the assignation of privacy to the visual and communality to the aural, is far richer and less straightforward in premodern poetic situations than it is for the modernity Prins discusses (Prins Citation2016, 22, 26). On medieval poetic form as an experience constituted in the interaction of multiple media, see Chaganti Citation2018.
20. See Nuttall in the forthcoming companion issue to this one.
21. Phillipa Hardman discusses a related phenomenon in her recasting of Lydgate’s “uneasy” syntax as deliberate and strongly connected to meanings he wishes to impart, as in the case of the Life of our Lady, which uses a kind of splicing aesthetic to draw together different narrative temporal reckonings, the “continuity of prophecy, revelation in time, and faithful response” (Citation2006, 18–19).