Abstract
While historically existing animals and literary animal characters inform allegorical and metaphorical characterization in The Canterbury Tales, figurative usage does not erase recognition of the material animal. “The Pardoner’s Tale,” for one, challenges the terms of conventional animal metaphors by refocusing attention on common animals as common animals and common human creatures as something worse than vermin. Most attention has been paid to the larger animals—goat, hare, and horse—that constitute the physical portrait of Chaucer’s Pardoner in the “General Prologue” and in the prologue to his tale.1 Like these animals, rats and a polecat, together with rhetorical shrews, appear in this tale as well as in other literature, including bestiaries and natural histories. Equally to the purpose, these animals could be physically observed as constituents of both urban and rural landscapes in fourteenth-century England.2. In the Middle Ages, animals were part of the environment as well as part of the culture: they lived inside as well as outside the city gates, priory walls, and even domestic spaces; a rat in the street or the garden might not be any less welcome or uncommon than encountering someone’s horses and goats nibbling vegetation or blocking a passage. Not being out of the ordinary, though, such animals could (and can) be overlooked or dismissed as common, too familiar to register.
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Notes
Most recently Alastair Minnis, Fallible Authors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 147–69, discusses the image of the horse and goat and, in so doing, reviews the earlier scholarship, especially that which associates these animals with the Pardoner’s sexuality and the implications for his spirituality (see note 16); see also Elizabeth Fowler, Literary Character (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 68.
Lesley Kordecki, “Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Animal Discourse, Women, and Subjectivity,” Chaucer Review 36 (2002), 292 [277–97].
See, for example, Susan Crane, “For the Birds,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 23–41, and Kordecki, “Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale.”
Susan McHugh, “Literary Animal Agents,” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 489 [487–495].
N. C. W. Spence, “The Human Bestiary,” The Modern Language Review 96.4 (2001), 918 [913–30], primarily discusses contemporary usage in modern European languages.
James Howe, “Fox Hunting as Ritual,” American Ethnologist 8.2 (1981): 291 [278–300]. Susan Crane, “For the Birds,” mentions Howe’s “symbolic loop” as a means for considering the origins of merit when it comes to species and the effect of the loop in establishing and then destabilizing the sense of “founding subjectivity” (28).
See Sandy Feinstein, “Shrews and Sheep in the Second Shepherds’ Play,” Pacific Coast Philology 36 (2001): 64–80, for a discussion of the history of the word “shrew” and the use of animals in the play.
Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts (Worcester, UK: Duckworth, 1991), p. 66, remark the curious rareness of the shrew’s presence in the bestiaries, an absence they find “strange” because “the shrew is a familiar animal and immediately recognizable by its long nose.” In addition to citing the Bodleian Bestiary, they note that the shrew, sorex, as well as the “domesticated polecat” or ferret, furo, and “the long mouse” or weasel, Mustela, appear in Westminster MS 22, where the shrew is associated with “the vice of luxury” and the dormouse, glis, is identified with greed (pp. ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+)).
Sara Churchfield, The Natural History of Shrews (Ithaca, NY: Comstock, 1990), p. 94, notes that measured estimates indicate shrews consume approximately ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+) percent of their body weight each day. Smaller species, such as the Eurasian Pygmy Shrew (Sorex minutus), typically eat a higher percentage of their body weight (125%) than larger species like the European Common Shrew (Sorex araneus) (80-90%).
Edward Topsell, The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents, 3 vols. (1658; rept. London: Frank Cass & Co., 1967), 1: 416. Topsell’s view reflects the earlier opinion on the “migale” by Albertus Magnus, On Animals, ed. Kenneth Kitchel and Irven Resnick, 2 vols. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 2: 1523, who states, “It has a cruel spirit but hides this and lures animals on, killing them with its poison if it can.” According to Topsell, though, its venom extends beyond the physical, for he adds, “It beareth a cruel mind, desiring to hurt anything, neither is there any creature it loveth” (1: 416).
Raychel Haugrud Reiff, “Chaucer’s ‘The Pardoner’s Tale,’” The Explicator 57.4 (1999): 195 [195-98].
Beryl Rowland, Blind Beasts (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1971), p. 66.
Dorothy Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 14.
See S. Harris and D. W. Yalden, eds., Mammals of the British Isles: Handbook, 4th edn. (Southampton, UK: The Mammal Society, 1988), pp. ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+), for information on the implicated rat, Rattus rattus, commonly known as Black Rat, Roof Rat, or Ship Rat, a species of rodent that now occurs nearly worldwide, but then was a relative newcomer to the British Isles, having arrived with the Romans. Beryl Rowland, Blind Beasts, p. 66, offers a later date, suggesting that “the black rat was probably imported to Europe from the Levant by the Crusaders.” She says it was unquestionably known in France at least from the early thirteenth century. According to Harris and Yalden, p. 151, the other primary species of “Rat” in Great Britain, Rattus norvegicus, commonly known as the Common Rat, Brown Rat, or Norway Rat, did not arrive there until the eighteenth century, possibly ca. 1720. For more recent examples justifying ill treatment of mice and rats or discussing human antipathy toward them, see, for example, M. A. C. Hinton, Rats and Mice as Enemies of Mankind, British Museum (Natural History), Economic Series 3 (1918), pp. i-x, ([0-9])–([0-9])3; and Hal Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), the book cover of which has the title words “some we hate” written inside the body of a silhouetted rat.
Susan Crane, “A Taxonomy of Creatures in the Second-Family Bestiary,” New Medieval Literature 10 (2008): 7 [1-48].
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© 2012 Carolynn Van Dyke
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Feinstein, S., Woodman, N. (2012). Shrews, Rats, and a Polecat in “The Pardoner’s Tale”. In: Van Dyke, C. (eds) Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137040732_4
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