"The lytel erthe that here is": Environmental Thought in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls

Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls traces his rejection of Neoplatonist and moral allegories, with their emphasis on transcendent truths and teachings. Instead, the Parliament's dreamer observes and absorbs a richly sensual earthly environment, replacing mainstream allegory's guiding question "How shall I save myself?" with the more mundane question "What's happening here?" In exploring this latter question, the Parliament stages three contrasting ontologies—three models of how living things are interrelated—that continue to inform anthropological and environmental thought today. As dualism, animism, and totemism collide and intersect, Chaucer develops a productive uncertainty about the order of things. His ontological experiment offers a prehistory and a way forward for contemporary environmental theory.