Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations by Michael J. Warren (review)

Birds have fascinated medievalists since before the "animal turn"— witness Beryl Rowland's Birds with Human Souls (1978)—and monographs on the subject have proliferated since scholars such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Gillian Rudd, and Dorothy Yamamoto invited us to engage with nature. Michael J. Warren's Birds in Medieval English Poetry is a welcome addition to such scholarship. Warren is familiar with theoretical work by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and well-versed in ornithology, but his argument relies on careful and nuanced close readings of five early English poems. Warren maintains that birds in these poems cannot be read as purely metaphorical, and so scholars must attend to how they reveal real birds in ways that "hint at diverse, interpenetrating orientations" where "natural and cultural histories overlap, reciprocate and interweave" (5). After an introduction, Warren focuses each chapter around a central poetic work: (1) The Seafarer, (2) the Exeter Book Riddles, (3) The Owl and the Nightingale, (4) Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, and (5) the "Tale of Tereus" in Gower's Confessio Amantis.

Reveling in contact between human and avian, between bodies and thought, and between science and art, Birds in Medieval English Poetry attends to both allegorical figuration and natural philosophy to argue that because birds resist categorization with their penchant for transformation via flight, migration, molting, singing, and oviparous reproduction, they are "crucial to the potentialities, effects and limitations" of human imagination and experience (18). As Warren explains near the end of the Chaucer chapter, "If animal imagery has long been understood as casting the nonhuman in human terms in order to explore human matters, sometimes we catch something of the animal terms, too, reversing our attempts to superimpose so that some of what we intend for the human tenor … rubs off on the feathered vehicle" (175). In essence, Warren enacts the Nightingale's reminder that fables are never completely fictional (line 128 in The Owl and the Nightingale), taking medieval ornithology seriously while also giving due diligence to medieval secular and religious concerns and to modern scholarly debates.

Chapter 1 begins with Bede's story of the sparrow from the Historia ecclesiastica to establish a connection between bird and soul in biblical and Anglo-Saxon allegory that is relevant for understanding The Seafarer: "As in the famous sparrow analogy, we encounter the same fluctuations between hall-life and the daunting outside world, the mind that weighs up the two in opposition, and birds that are associated with both these worlds" (28). This foundation allows Warren to read the poem as a unified whole, whereby "a curious avian materiality" inhabits both the naming of seabirds in the ocean setting at the beginning of the poem and the figure of the lone-flier that marks the turn from seascape to contemptus mundi (29). Attending to bird habits and habitations, Warren reads both passages as simultaneously "factual and figurative," so that the obscurity of the afterlife inheres in the acknowledgment that birds cannot replace human companions in the first passage (63). Literal and figurative modes converge to reveal that the deprivation and loneliness of embodied physical journeying prepare the speaker for a posthumous unknown.

Building on observations about avian foreignness, Chapter 2 argues that "in being both nameable and anonymous [birds] suit riddles' tendencies to obfuscate and disambiguate concurrently" (66). When combined with the lack of solutions in the Exeter manuscript, the swan (Riddle 7), the barnacle goose (Riddle 24), the jay (Riddle 8), the elusive Riddle 57, and especially the fingers and quill of Riddle 51, for Warren, "encourage willingness to admit uncertainties, to recognize but not circumscribe the web of sprawling, inclusive contiguities between animate and inanimate individuals" (84). Birds, like riddles, then, inspire wonder and irresolution.

The Owl and the Nightingale, subject of Chapter 3, depicts a famously unresolved debate, and Warren offers new insight into how the poem intertwines "the natural...