Talking Animals, Debating Beasts

Author / Editor
Matlock, Wendy A.

Title
Talking Animals, Debating Beasts

Published
Carolynn Van Dyke, ed. Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 217-31.

Description
Explores anthropomorphism and the "connaturality" of human and nonhuman animals in PF and Lydgate's "Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep," noting the comments of medieval and modern philosophers on the traditional animal-human binary. Lydgate's poem was as popular as Chaucer's in the Middle Ages, and it is more "radical" in its "sympathy for animal suffering."

Alternative Title
Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts.

Chaucer Subjects
Parliament of Fowls