Conjugal Rights in Flux in Medieval Poetry Page: 41
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with his alleged offense by revealing his concern for hasty rulings in the English legal system
and laws regarding conjugal rights.
Much like the dissonant parliament of birds who cannot agree on which eagle the formel
should marry in Chaucer's last and arguably most complex dream vision, The Parliament of
Fowls (hereafter, PF), literary critics of the poem cannot come to a consensus on its unifying
theme, leading some scholars to argue that there is not one. David Aers, for instance, argues that
Chaucer pushes against traditional modes of authority in PF and that the poem is "thoroughly
subversive of all forms of dogmatic thought."'00 One of the major tensions in the poem does
indeed appear to be between classical texts and Chaucer's own translations of them into the
English vernacular. Stylistically, Chaucer endeavors to elevate his final dream vision to the epic
heights of his classical sources. Instead of continuing to employ unadorned iambic tetrameter
couplets, like he did in his earlier dream visions The Book of the Duchess and The House of
Fame, he decides to set PF in rhyme royal-the same style that elevated the Italian vernacular
poetry of Boccaccio and Dante.101 Although Chaucer mimics the style of his classical
predecessors, he decides to depart from them thematically so as to address the problematic way
his sources define "common profit."
One important deviation between Cicero's version of Scipio's dream and Chaucer's
reimagining of it in his own vision, however, is the introduction of agentive female characters in
the latter. PF commences with Chaucer the narrator reading Cicero's Dream of Scipio, an old
book that he hopes to learn from.'02 The narrator ends up falling asleep and dreams that he is in a
100 David Aers, "The Parliament of Fowls: Authority, the Knower and the Known," Chaucer Review 16
(1981): 1-17.
101 Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Parliament of Fowls," Dream Visions and Other Poems, ed.
Kathryn L. Lynch (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 93-96, at 93.
102 As the Norton Critical Edition notes, this work may be found in the sixth and final book of Cicero's De
re publica. Ibid., 97.41
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Ward, Jessica D. Conjugal Rights in Flux in Medieval Poetry, thesis, May 2014; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500176/m1/46/?rotate=270: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .