Download Danielle Magnusson

Danielle Magnusson
Talking Animals In Chaucer’s Literary Realm
Bibilography
Coldewey, John C. “Secrets of God’s Creatures: Talking Animals in Medieval Drama.”
Eurpean Medieval Drama. Ed. Sydney Higgins. Turnhout: Brepols U, 2000.
Illustrates the historical, textual, and performative conditions in which talking animals
appeared on the medieval English stage. Coldewey focuses on the biblical source for
talking animals (Burnell and the Serpent) alongside their gendered relationship to
textual, theatrical, and artistic portrayals of Adam’s Fall. This emphasis on the visual is
used, in part, to explain the transition from humorless biblical versions of Burnell and
the Serpent, to the comic realities found on the medieval stage.
Freedman, Paul. “The Representation of Medieval Peasants as Bestial and as Human.”
The Animal Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives. Ed. Angela N.H.
Creager and William Chester Jordan. Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2002. 29-50.
Examines how medieval Europeans conceptualized and invoked the boundary between
themselves and animals. Freedman explores the ways in which elites represented
peasants as beasts, and, to some extent, treated them that way, drawing on excerpts and
other sources from many regions over the course of the Middle Ages in order to
demonstrate the pervasiveness of the dehumanization.
Honegger, Thomas. From Phoenix to Chauntecleer: Medieval English Animal Poetry.
Swiss Studies in English 120. Tubingen and Basel: Francke Verlag, 1996.
Few have attempted a methodical study of the genre in medieval English literature.
Honegger’s book is one of the few such studies. Honegger thoroughly discusses issues
of authorship, dating, manuscript history, sources, analogues, and critical history.
Karras, Ruth Mazo. “Separating the Men from the Goats: Masculinty, Civilization, and
Identity Formation in the Medieval University,” The Animal Human Boundary:
Historical Perspectives. Ed. Angela N.H. Creager and William Chester Jordan.
Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2002. 50-77.
Argues that if 20th century university social groups, such as fraternities, can be said to
repudiate the feminine, than initiation rites for the beanus (first-year students) in
medieval universities focused symbolically on exorcising the bestial and uncivilized.
Meens, Rob. “Eating Animals in the Early Middle Ages: Classifying the Animal World
and Building Group Identities.” The Animal Human Boundary: Historical
Perspectives.
Ed. Angela N.H. Creager and William Chester Jordan.
Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2002. 3-29.
Describes how concepts such as “clean” and “unclean” animals formed rituals of dietary
and social exclusion. Meens looks to the issue of food prohibitions as a window on the
human/animal boundary in medieval European society.
Rowland, Beryl. Blind Beasts: Chaucer’s Animal World. Kent: Kent State University
Press, 1971.
Rowland offers a survey of Chaucer’s use of animals that is heavily indebted to both
the bestiary and beast fable traditions.