September 2006 NOTES AND QUERIES
8
Governance (on fos 6–13). This text is not
found in Fitzwilliam 261, where Lydgate’s
Dietary follows, as the last item in the
manuscript.
The parallel sections of Cambridge
University Library Ll.1.18 and Fitzwilliam
Museum 261 which consist of the John of
Burgundy plague tract followed by the two
pest regimens may not be sufficiently close in
detail to suggest a direct relationship between
the two. However, since they have not been
recorded as occurring together in other manu-
scripts, the connection is intriguing and merits
closer attention.
KARI ANNE RAND
University of Oslo
doi:10.1093/notesj/gjl069
ß The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. For Permissions,
please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
8
The manuscript also contains, on fos 74–75v, the
‘Delictissime frater’ treatise, which is yet another version
of the John of Burgundy plague tract, but one which appears
only to occur in Latin, not in English.
EAGLES MATING WITH DOVES:
TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, II, 925–931,
INFERNO v AND PURGATORIO ix*
CHAUCER’s use of Dante was subtle and
complex. Recent critical positions have called
into question Chaucer’s reception of Dante’s
fictional afterlife but there can be no doubt
that the poetry of the Commedia had a
vitalizing effect on Chaucer’s own poetic
development. One small example of such
complex textual interaction comes with
the figure of Criseyde’s dream of the eagle at
the end of Book II of Troilus and Criseyde.
Book II of Troilus and Criseyde opens with
Pandarus awakening to the birdsong of the
swallow. Her lamentations (described as a
‘sorowful lay’ and ‘waymentynge’) are almost
pointed at Pandarus, as if they were a
frustrated attempt to tell him of her metamor-
phosis and its gruesome cause: ‘Til she so neigh
* Gratitude must be extended to Professor Vincent
Gillespie for his patient guidance and inspiration, and to
the Wingate Foundation for financial support.
297
hym made hire cheterynge/How Tereus gan
forth hire suster take’ (lines 68–9).1 Pandarus
gets up and prepares his errand of the day,
to tell Criseyde of Troilus’ feelings for her. The
ambiguity of Ovid’s account of Procne and
Philomena in the sixth book of Metamorphoses
has led to two literary traditions in which
Procne is transformed into either a swallow or
a nightingale. Chaucer has interpreted Procne
as the swallow and Philomena as the night-
ingale, and included the tale in the Legend of
Good Women (F 2228–2393). This is the
tradition of the Roman poets, and it is the
tradition Petrarch follows, for example in
Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 310. Dante, on
the other hand, follows a second tradition
where Procne is transformed into a night-
ingale, and Philomena a swallow, a tradition
that dates back to Aristotle’s Rhetorica
(III.3.1406b15–19). Despite these differing
traditions, the unmistakable Dantean echo
in the ‘sorowful lay’ brings us to Dante’s
Purgatorio:
Ne l’ora che comincia i tristi lai
la rondinella presso a la mattina,
forse a memoria de’ suo’ primi guai
(Purg. ix, 13–15)
[‘At the hour near morning when the
swallow begins her plaintive songs, in
remembrance, perhaps, of her ancient
woes’]2
Purgatorio ix will prove a focal point again
towards the close of Book II of Troilus, just
after Criseyde has learned of Troilus’ feelings
for her. Criseyde, in the company of her ladies,
considers what to do. Antigone, described as
‘fresshe’ and ‘white’, sings a song that visibly
moves Criseyde. The ladies retire:
And white thynges wexen dymme and donne
For lak of lyght, and sterres for t’apere,
That she and alle hire folk in went yfeere.
(Troilus and Criseyde, II, 908–10)
Criseyde goes to sleep listening to a nightingale
outside her window, singing ‘a lay/Of love’.
She dreams that a white eagle flies down and
1
All references to Chaucer are to The Riverside edition,
gen. ed. Larry D. Benson.
2
For the text of the Commedia see La Commedia secondo
l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, 4 vols (Milan,
1966–7); for the translation see that of J. D. Sinclair
(Oxford, 1971).
298 NOTES AND QUERIES
rips her heart out of her breast, and replaces it
with his own. The entire passage repeats
the figure of the heart a significant number of
times, at lines 869, 871, 872, 900, 902, and 922.
The description of the eagle, ‘fethered whit
as bon’, with his long claws is as surreal as
it is frightening. Its ‘authentic strangeness’
lends the dream to interpretation rather than
dismissing it as a nightmare.3 The dream
presents us with a striking image: a white
eagle.4 Chaucer has done much in the episode
to create an eerie atmosphere: the juxtaposi-
tion of light and dark, Antigone the ‘white’,
the visible things of day are replaced with
a dark and starless sky. In the Purgatorio,
very soon after Dante has heard the ‘tristi lai’
of the swallow, we witness Dante’s dream of
the eagle:
in sogno mi parea veder sospesa
un’aguglia nel ciel con penne d’oro,
con l’ali aperte e a calare intesa;
ed esser mi parea là dove fuoro
abbandonati i suoi Ganimede,
quando fu ratto al sommo consistoro
(Purgatorio, ix, 19–24)
[‘I seemed to see in a dream an eagle poised
in the sky, with feathers of gold, with open
wings, and prepared to swoop. And I seemed
to be in the place where his own people were
left behind by Ganymede when he was
caught up to the supreme conclave.’]
Dante sees an eagle suspended before him,
with outstretched wings and ready to land. He
is taken by this eagle up to the sphere of the
sun where he awakens to discover that Lucy
had appeared and taken him, asleep, to the
door of Purgatory. The eagle is a common
medieval symbol of contemplation, and was
often associated with keen vision and high
flight.5 Jacopo della Lana writes that the eagle
‘figura il suo intelletto esser abile e disposto ad
3
A. C. Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry (London,
1964), 103.
4
A white eagle features on the arm of Emetreus, the king
of India, in The Knight’s Tale (I [A] 2177–8): ‘Upon his hand
he bar for his deduyt/An egle tame, as any lilye whyt’. While
both eagles may be said to have royal connotations, the
tameness of this eagle (symbolizing Emetreus’ power)
strongly contrasts with Criseyde’s rapacious eagle, typified
in their figurative descriptions as lily-white and white as
bone.
5
John M. Steadman, ‘Chaucer’s Eagle: A Contemplative
Symbol’, PMLA, lxxv (1960), 153–9.
September 2006
ascendere’ (ad Purg. ix, 19–21) and Pietro
Alighieri sees the eagle representing abstract
thought and imagination.6 It is this tradition
that informs Eustache Deschamps’s high
praise of Chaucer as the ‘Aigles treshaulz’
who with his ‘theorique’ illuminated the king-
dom of Aeneas.7 Chaucer has used the bird-
songs of the swallow and the nightingale to
open and close the day’s action, drawing
from Purgatorio ix for both the ‘tristi lai’ of
the swallow and Criseyde’s dream.
But the image of a bird suspended with
outstretched wings is also reminiscent of
Dante’s description of Paolo and Francesca
in Inferno v. These two damned, buffeted by
a stormy passionate wind, approach Dante
after Virgil calls them:
Quali colombe dal disio chiamate
con l’ali alzate e ferme al dolce nido
vegnon per l’aere, dal voler portate.
(Inf. v, 82–4)
[‘As doves, summonded by desire, come with
wings poised and motionless to the sweet
nest, borne by their will through the air.’]
One of the most striking connections between
Inferno v and Purgatorio ix is an aural link:
that between the cranes that sing their song
(‘lor lai’) and the ‘tristi lai’ of Purgatorio ix.
The presence of the word ‘ratto’ in both canti
is yet another link, though they are used in
different senses. In Inferno v, ‘Amor ch’al cor
gentil ratto s’apprende’ (line 100; ‘Love, which
is quickly kindled in the gentle heart’), uses
ratto as an adverb, from rapidus. Purgatorio ix,
‘quando fu ratto al sommo consistoro’ (line 24;
‘when he was caught up to the supreme
conclave’) uses ratto as a past participle,
a derivative of raptus. The eerie nocturnal
atmosphere described before Criseyde’s dream,
with its lack of light and stars, recalls Dante’s
‘Io venni in loco d’ogne luce muto’ (Inf. v, 26).
6
Jacopo della Lana, Comedia di Dante degli Allagherii,
ed. Luciano Scarabelli, 3 vols (Bologna, 1866); Pietro
Alighieri, Petri Allegherii super Dantis ipsius genitoris
Comeodiam commentarium nunc primum in lucen editum
consilio et sumtibus G.J. bar. Vernon, ed. Vincenzo Nannucci
(Florence, 1845).
7
Eustache Deschamps, Œuvres comple`tes de Eustache
Deschamps, ed. Gaston Raynaud and Saint-Hilaire de
Queux, Société des anciens textes français, 11 vols (Paris,
1878), II, 138–40; see also T. Atkinson Jenkins, ‘Deschamps’
Ballade to Chaucer’, MLN, xxxiii (1918), 268–78.
September 2006 NOTES AND QUERIES
Chaucer specifically refers to the feathers of
the eagle, just as Dante picks out the feathers
and their colour for attention. Chaucer’s white
eagle is a complex literary matrix of Dantean
references. The birdsongs of Procne and
Philomena link the opening of Book II of
Troilus and Criseyde with the end of the book
at Criseyde’s dream, and both Chaucerian
moments are textually indebted to the birdsong
and dream of the eagle in Purgatorio ix. This
plaintive birdsong, furthermore, recalls the
cranes and the landing doves with outstretched
wings of the doomed lovers in Inferno v.
These images all come together at another
point in the Troilus in a most surprising way.
At the end of Book III the lovers are forced to
part by the onset of day. Troilus curses the
day and declares his love to Criseyde saying
that he is her servant and her knight, and
they are mutually committed to each other: ‘in
your herte iset so fermely/As ye in myn’ (lines
1488–9). This subtle refiguring of the heart that
played such a noticeable part of Criseyde’s
dream, elicits a response from her in the form
of an address to her own heart and a promise
employing the rhetorical device of adynaton:
To that Criseyde answerde right anon,
And with a sik she seyde, ‘‘O herte deere,
The game, ywys, so ferforth now is gon
That first shal Phebus fallen fro his speere,
And everich egle ben the dowves feere,
And everich roche out of his place sterte,
Er Troilus oute of Criseydes herte.
(TC, III, 1492–8)
The exaggeration is highlighted by her use
of anaphora, ‘And everich’.8 The impossible
will happen before the possible: the sun will fall
out of the sky, eagles will mate with doves,
rocks will jump out of their place, before
Troilus will be out of her heart. Not only is
there an echo of the figure of the heart that
recalls the concentration of textual occurrances
of the figure of the heart just before Criseyde’s
dream, but the image of an eagle reappears,
this time, together with the figure of a dove.
The equivalent scene in the Filostrato (III, 48)
does not employ the impossibilium but at the
8
Christopher Bookhouse, ‘Chaucer’s Impossibilia’,
Medium Ævum, xxxiv (1965), 40–2.
299
same time reminds us more strongly of
Criseyde’s dream:
amore è uno spirito avaro, e quando
alcuna cosa prende, sı́ la tene
serrata forte e stretta con gli artigli,
ch’a liberarla invan si dan consigli.9
[Love is an avaricious spirit, and when it
grabs hold of something it holds on so
tightly with its claws that no amount of
persuasion will release it.]
It is the pairing of doves and eagles that is so
interesting in Criseyde’s impossiblium, not just
because it is the only occurrence in the entire
poem of the dove, a bird of love that might
have been used more in a poem of love, but
the truth of Criseyde’s declaration has been
questioned from the very first lines of the
poem. That is, the impossibility Criseyde
declares that Troilus will never leave her
heart is very much a possibility, an inevita-
bility. The figure of doves mating with eagles,
then, draws together a complex set of associa-
tions in Book II between Purgatorio ix and
the golden eagle and Inferno v and the doves.
The lamenting birdsongs of the betrayed
sisters Procne and Philomena runs through
both Inferno v and Purgatorio ix creating a link
between Pandarus’ awakening and plan to
inform Criseyde of her princely suitor, and
Criseyde’s falling asleep and dream of the
eagle. The strange white crossbred eagle is a
superimposition of the eagle of Purgatorio ix
and the doves of Inferno v, one that figures the
royal associations of Troilus with the doomed
love of Paolo and Francesca. The mating of
eagles and doves is far from an impossibility
but has been subtly figured throughout
Book II of Troilus and Criseyde.
K. P. CLARKE
University College, Oxford
doi:10.1093/notesj/gjl070
ß The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. For Permissions,
please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
9
Giovanni Boccaccio, Filostrato, ed. Vittore Branca, vol.
II in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, gen. ed. V. Branca,
10 vols (Milan, 1964–1998). Translation mine.
Copyright of Notes & Queries is the property of Oxford University Press / UK and its content may not be
copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.