'The Parliament of Fowls'

Author / Editor
Cherniss, Michael D.

Title
'The Parliament of Fowls'

Published
Chap. 7 in Michael D. Cherniss, Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1987), pp. 119-47.

Description
Demonstrates how PF uses the naive Boethian narrator--who, confused about love, turns "Ciceronian virtue and vice into varieties of 'love'." Reader expectation is frequently thwarted: the narrator misperceives his "own relationship to the locus of his visionary experience and...to his waking researches."
Examines Chaucer's use of "Somnium Scipionis," and traditions of nature and garden within the Boethian framework: PF is a "Boethian vision poem by virtue of the relationship of the vision to the visionary's preoccupations," a relationship that "depends upon his confusion and desire for knowledge" about love.

Alternative Title
Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry.

Chaucer Subjects
Parliament of Fowls.
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.