From Phoenix to Chauntecleer: Medieval English Animal Poetry by Thomas Honegger (review)

REVIEWS THOMAS HONEGGER. From Phoenix to Chauntecleer: Medieval English Animal Poetry. Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten/Swiss Studies in English, vol.120.Ti.ibingen, Basil: A.Francke Verlag, 1996.Pp.ix, 288.N.p. There have been any number of studies of medieval English literature dealing with animals and its Latin, French, or Italian background, but no examination concentrating exclusively on the major functions of the animal figures in the chief examples of medieval English animal poetry. It is such a task that Thomas Honegger has set himself in this disserta­ tion, completed at the University of Zurich.His monograph provides the reader with a wealth of information for understanding the role played by animals in the Physiologus tradition in Old and Middle English (chapter 2); in "bird poems" from The Owl and the Nightingale to Chaucer's The Parliament of Fowls (chapter 3); and in two Middle English beast fables/epics, The Vox andthe Wolfand Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale (chapter 4). Honegger's extensive study of the Physiologus tradition (pp.17-100) proceeds along structuralist lines, developing a model of an "ideal" chap­ ter from Latin representatives of the Physiologus that serves as a point of reference for his analysis of the Old and Middle English texts in this grouping.Such a typical chapter begins its presentation of an animal with a biblical citation that mentions that animal explicitly, develops "scientific" data about the animal adopted from natural history in a first section, then interprets these characteristics s piritually and allegorically in the next section, and concludes with a brief statement of affirmation ("And so the Physiologus has spoken well concerning ... ").Honegger's analysis of The Old English Physiologus concludes that the structure of its entries recapitulates this model, though generally without the explicit citation of a biblical verse at the beginning and with a more extensive moralizing epilogue.The function of the animals in the Old English text remains that of providing an occasion for the significatio: only those char­ acteristics that support a consistent spiritual interpretation of the ani­ mal are mentioned in the section of "scientific" data.It is on structural grounds as well that Honegger justifies his analysis of The Phoenix here, for the implicit division in this poem between a section of characteris­ tics of the phoenix derived from natural history and one devoted to the eschatological and typological signification of these characteristics par­ allels the model he has developed of the typical chapter in the Physiologus 255 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tradition. Unlike its Old English precursor, The Middle English Physiologus demonstrates an increased interest in the sensus moralis in its interpretation ofanimal characteristics. As Honegger emphasizes in par­ ticular in his analysis of the chapter on the dove in The Middle English Physiologus (which has no equivalent in the Theobaldi "Physiologus" that served as the Latin source for most of the English work), moral inter­ pretation is the characteristic method ofsignificatio in the Middle English text. Ofthe uses ofanimals in secular Middle English literature, Honegger is concerned mainly with two traditions: that which employs the alle­ gorical and symbolic (and generally courtly) dimensions ofanimal char­ acteristics on the one hand (pp. 103-66), and the genres ofthe beast epic and beast fable on the other (pp. 169-227). Symbolic qualities of ani­ mals are used in a number ofMiddle English genres, such as political po­ etry like Mum and the Sothsegger (identified here by its outdated title, Richard the Rede/es, and erroneously attributed to William Langland [p. 10}), but the examples in this tradition analyzed by Honegger, in which animals play a major role, generally involve questions oflove and frequently employ the debate form. Although that form regularly pre­ sents the question ofthe animals' usefulness to human beings as the piv­ otal point of the debate, the author of The Owl and the Nightingale ini­ tially frustrates this expectation, reminding the reader frequently of the avian nature of the debate's protagonists instead. In Honegger's under­ standing, the shifting nature of the symbolic reading the birds give of each other-the owl attempts to identify itselfwith the nycticorax tradi­ tion, for example, while the nightingale attempts...