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

Combining ornithological and literary history, this book is an important contribution to environmental history and ecocriticism, unpacking the complex relationships between human and other creatures and their shared environments. As Michael Warren points out, 'natural and cultural histories overlap': ornithological knowledge deepens our understanding of birds in medieval and modern culture (pp. 5–6). The five chapters analyse a range of texts chosen to show where 'metaphor and realities fuse and collide' (p. 10), allowing Warren to discuss natural and cultural history together. While 'a full exploration of how and why birds mattered' (p. 3) cannot be achieved in five case studies, other birds in other texts are mentioned throughout, and the choices and analyses bring out five distinct 'ways […] feathered physicality and transformation is embraced […] as part of poetic strategy' (p. 23) in England from the tenth to fifteenth centuries. In turn, each chapter illuminates a different aspect of metaphor.

Birds have always been a powerful metaphor for human experience, being both like humans (voice, bipedality) and unlike (flight, feathers). As Warren notes, medieval thinkers understood metaphor as an interrelation of likeness and unlikeness, making birds as a metaphor a rich study. The book focuses on particular ways birds both resemble and differ from humans, both physically and in social and ecological roles. Adaptability is another characteristic that could usefully have been discussed in a concluding chapter, had scope allowed.

Chapter 1 discusses the flight of seabirds in The Seafarer as a metaphor for the pilgrimage of the soul. The argument's originality lies in its construction: Warren shows how the familiar littoral environment and the voices of the seabirds—which recall, but are not, the human voices of the hall—reframe the poem as homecoming, as well as exile (as in the more traditional reading).

Chapter 2 explores how disguise and trickery among birds such as the cuckoo and jay illustrate and interrogate the boundaries of knowledge in the riddles of the Exeter Book. The focus on resemblance and illusion, on what we can and cannot know, drives a discussion of metaphor's uses in medieval pedagogy.

Chapter 3 considers the (human) values attached to different species, embedded in metaphors like the owl's night-sight for spiritual blindness. In The Owl and the Nightingale, the problematic nature of such metaphors as both inaccurate and harmful to birds (owls are neither blind nor evil) is debated in the birds' own voices. Warren's analysis prompts us to think critically about medieval observation of animal kinds, and about what such observations can tell us about birds and about human–nonhuman relations.

Throughout, Warren gives the Old English names of species, grounding the reader's understanding in the primary sources and allowing the non-specialist a richer experience. The cultural specificity of onomatopoeic bird names hints at another form of 'in-betweenness' between the metaphorical and the literal (p. 16). The cultural and linguistic moments embedded in such names could also inform studies of sound, accent, and rhyme, as well as of historical semantics, such as Warren's forthcoming work on birds in place-names.

Chapter 4, on Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, explores the limits of language and cross-species translation (translatio being the Latin for Greek metaphora). Like the poet's struggle to express birds' voices in English, mystical language, allegory, and metaphor attempt the impossible. Warren's book asks, and his choice and analysis of texts attempts to show, 'what […] we lose, overlook or misrepresent that […] cannot be transferred' (p. 222).

In Chapter 5, literal transformations in Gower's Confessio Amantis enable a discussion of desire and identity across species, recentring the physical in the cultural. This last chapter is for me one of the most striking and successful, as it shows how the metaphor of transformation establishes a more nuanced understanding of the physical and human world.

'In all aspects...