Description
Book SynopsisThe Owl and the Nightingale is clearly one of the few major Middle English poems. Despite the clarity and simplicity of its text, however, the poem has occasioned bitter and still unresolved interpretative controversy. Is the key to its meaning to be found in bird lore? the debate form? Is the poem a political or religious allegory? Despite the radical contradictions in the conclusions of previous critics, most of them have implicitly claimed a unique and exclusive validity.
Kathryn Hume's purpose in writing this book is to offer a new account of the poem, one based on a systematic attempt to assess the validity and usefulness of various possible approaches to the work. She shows saneness, balance, and humour both in her criticism of previous interpretations and in her own conclusions. We need, she insists, to understand the nature of the poem before we erect elaborate theories about its meaning.
The contradictoriness of the relevant avian traditions, the birds
