Talking Animals, Debating Beasts

Abstract

Scholarly discourse in the late Middle Ages insisted that only humans possessed the capacity for wisdom and speech, yet speaking animals proliferate in the popular literature of the era. Peter G. Sobol explains the educated position: “The scholars of late medieval Europe, who saw the incarnate soul in Aristotelian terms and the soul after death in Christian terms, believed that humans alone possessed the mental and spiritual power to act wisely and well.”¹ Joyce E. Salisbury summarizes the thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas on the subject: “He says people cannot show animals charity (love) or even friendship, because animals are not rational creatures and fellowship is based on reason. Aquinas goes on to say that people can only feel ‘friendly’ to animals metaphorically, not actually.”² Despite scholarly refusal to grant animals intelligence, considerations of animal communication and understanding recur in popular texts. This chapter explores Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls and John Lydgate’s The Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep as poems in which animals display reason and emotion.³ Both poems anthropomorphize animals, granting them language and reason, and derive human morals from their discourse; however, both also depict animals as animals, that is, as creatures that resist identification with humanity and exist independently.