“rather be used / than be eaten”?: Harry Bailly’s Animals and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale

In 1975, Umberto Eco traveled in hyperreality, visiting in passing the San Diego zoo. This zoo was, according to him, “unquestionably the one where the animal is most respected. But it is unclear whether this respect is meant to convince the animal or the human.”¹ Respect and conviction continue to trouble animal studies as we are repeatedly encouraged to examine what respect entails, how it is best expressed, or, in Jacques Derrida’s case, to examine the anxiety attendant upon suspecting that the cat who shares his bathroom may not respect him at all.² Likewise, to posit that animals might need convincing is to admit that they are capable not just of complex thought processes but also of skepticism. But of what is it that we and the animals are to be convinced? Our similarity? Our difference? Or that in persisting in thinking in terms of similarity and difference we persist in an error of understanding both of what it means to be human and to be animal? Marianne Dekoven’s record of her “visceral” experience at the San Diego zoo, which made her aware of the possibility of a “two-way interaction with the animals,” refracts her reading of Eco and Derrida, but also indicates that there are many for whom such an experience is still revelatory, or even yet to come.³ Over and again, as the work of Erica Fudge has shown, humans are exercised by where we may draw the line between us and the rest of the animal world and, having drawn it, how, why, when, and where we may then cross or blur that line.⁴ Various tropes have been used to portray this process, from binary opposition to dividing abyss, from human-animal continuum to a sliding scale of anthropomorphism. Each of these is open to refinement: following Julia Kristeva, binary opposition admits expansion into a third term, the abject, where the animal may be found alongside those humans or human attributes deemed beyond taboo; thanks to Susan Crane, we are no longer restricted to sliding up and down a continuum, but may rather oscillate between terms that themselves are not necessarily fixed points on such scales.⁵ Yet whatever the terms of the debate, those core elements of respect and conviction are to be found, lurking or explicit, but still unresolved.

Eco also visited the Middle Ages on his travels, describing them as “the root of all our currently ‘hot’ problems,” which is why “it is not surprising that we go back to that period every time we ask ourselves about our origin” (65). No surprise, either, that animal studies and medieval studies should meet. In many cases, such as Derrida’s, the exploration of the animal is indeed inspired by questions about human origin or identity. If that is always so, we are stuck indeed, endlessly contemplating our own worth while ostensibly seeking to understand the worth of others. The best we can hope for is that occasional moments of imagination will liberate us from such relentless egocentrism and admit at least the possibility of conceiving of something outside the human that is not dependent upon it, something that may be appreciated without necessarily being valued in terms of its use to humans. However, if such moments do exist, I am not sure we find them in Chaucer. What we do find are some illustrations of the complex animal/ human relations that inform our language and habits of thought.

The Host’s heavy-handed humor that bookends The Nun’s Priest’s Tale offers two examples of the way animals routinely figure in our human habits of thought and language. In the first instance, Harry Bailly makes mocking reference to the “jade” (VII.2812) on which the Priest rides. In the immediate context of the exchange between Host, Knight, Monk, and Nun’s Priest, the rather overhearty exhortation not to be cast down because he rides a poor horse creates a silent contrast between the Priest’s comparative poverty and lack...