The Parlement of Foules: Aristotle’s Politics and the Foundations of Human Society

The Parlement of Foules: Aristotle's Politics and the Foundations of Human Society Paul A. Olson University ofNebraska, Lincoln RCENT studies in Th, Padw,nt ,j F,ul� hm m,d, it faidy clear that the two fabulous places in the poem, Venus' hothouse and Nature's hill, are representations ofcontrasting systems ofvalue or ways ofloving. The primary emphasis ofthe criticism has been on the work as a "question d'amour" poem in which the debate concerns how human beings should conduct the amorous life or how love may be redirected toward the God of Nature and his glorious creation. 1 Without wishing to denigrate such interpretations, I want to urge an alternative view­ one which sees the discussion oflove between men and women primarily as vehicle for a discussion of the nature of the social and social love in general. Within this perspective, I would suggest that the inclusion ofa "Parlement" is not fictional decoration, but a representation of that vehicle through which late medieval man found it most possible to develop his sense of sociability and conviviality. I The sources for my argument about Chaucer's Parlement are primarily late medieval neo-Aristotelian treatises on the nature ofthe political and social. As late medieval courts in northern Europe became somewhat more centralized, thinkers in those courts began to look at the nature of political conduct less from the perspective of single, personal loyalty between men located in a divinely arranged hierarchy-less from the 1 J. A. W. Bennett, The Parlement of Foules: An Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957); D. W. Robertson and Bernard F. Huppe, Fruyt and Cha/ (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 101-48; D. S. Brewer, ed., The Parlement ofFoulys (London: Thomas Nelson, 1960). 53 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER perspective which makes the central political action of the disloyal follower Guenelon's remark to Charlemagne "I do not love you at all"-and more from the perspective of how groups of people acting in essentially corporate bodies work out problems of loyalty, goals, conflict of interest, and organization. 2 It should be recalled that a Christian frame allowed for no appeal to that selfishness or self-interest as the motor of society posited by Adam Smith, and the new thought had to deal with the question of how human beings in society, in corporate bodies, are able to love one another through the institutional forms of a more complex society. 3 In the evolution of a tradition of thought which dealt with such questions, Aristotle's Politics was particularly helpful in that Aristotle provided a picture of how corporate institutions could support civic charity. The concept ofthe existence in the civic world of equivalents of cupidity and charity was conventional; natural law theory held that the civic equivalent of cupidity was the quest for "private profit," or what Chaucer calls "singular profit," and of charity was the quest for "the common profit. "4 The quest for the common profit, insofar as it was a natural instinct of man, could be seen as enlightened self-interest, but nature itself, in the case ofthe beasts and redeemed men, was seen as full 2 Compare, for example, the picture ofsocial relations in Marc Bloch's Feudal Society (Chicago: Univ.of Chicago Press, 1961) with that in May McKissack's The Fourteenth Century: 1307-1399 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).McKissack's remark that "when Edington became Chancellor in 1356 he found himself at the head of an elaborately organized bureaucracy" (p.213) could be made about numerous fourteenth-century English figures. 3 Initially theeconomic contracts which made Smith's description possible, based on self-interest and usury, had to be concealed under the language of "chevisaunces" (achievements) and terms of friendship as in The Shipman's Tale. 4 For common profit and charity as analogues, see Nicolai Rubenstein, "Political Ideas in Sienese Art: The Frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo Publico,")WC/, 21 (1958), 185-86; cf.John Bromyard, Summa Praedicantium (Venice: D.Nicolinum, 1586), I, 155; St.Bonaventura, "Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard," I, 33; II, 35; Henri de Gauschi, LiLivresdu Gouvernement desRois, ed.S. P.Molenaer (New...