First full-length study of birds and their metamorphoses as treated in a wide range of medieval poetry, from the Anglo-Saxons to Chaucer and Gower.

Is birdsong music? The most frequent answer to this question in the Middle Ages was resoundingly "no." In Sung Birds, Elizabeth Eva Leach traces postmedieval uses of birdsong within Western musical culture. She first explains why such melodious sound was not music for medieval thinkers and then goes on to consider the ontology of music, the significance of comparisons between singers and birds, and the relationship between art and nature as enacted by the musical performance of late-medieval poetry. If birdsong was not music, how should we interpret the musical depiction of birdsong in human music-making? What does it tell us about the singers, their listeners, and the moral status of secular polyphony? Why was it the fourteenth century that saw the beginnings of this practice, continued to this day in the music of Messiaen and others?Leach explores medieval arguments about song, language, and rationality whose basic terms survive undiminished into the present. She considers not only lyrics that have their singers voice the songs or speech of birds but also those that represent other natural, nonmusical, sounds such as human cries or the barks of dogs. The dangerous sweetness of birdsong was invoked in discussions of musical ethics, which, because of the potential slippage between irrational beast and less rational woman in comparisons with rational human masculinity, depict women's singing as less than fully human. Leach's argument comes full circle with the advent of sound recording. This technological revolution-like its medieval equivalent, the invention of the music book-once again made the relationship between music and nature an acute preoccupation of Western culture.

Somayeh Baeten, née Shafiei, is a German citizen born in Tehran in 1981. She was raised in a caring Persian family with her beloved mom, Soosan, who inspired and supported her devotedly through all stages of life, to whom this book is devoted. After finishing school, Somayeh as a talented student, finished her Bachelors and Masters in English Language and Literature in her hometown. She came later to Germany to continue her studies and received her Dr. Phil. (Ph.D.) in English Linguistics and Medieval Literature from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In Munich, she got to know her dear husband, Andre, and later gave birth to her lovely daughter, Niki. Since 2005, she has been teaching classes in English Linguistics and Literature at universities in both her hometown, Tehran, and Munich. Moreover, she has experienced Establishing and Organizing EFL Learning Centres at Universities in her hometown. Being motivated in her academic life and interested in both Persian and English literature, reading literary books, lecturing, translating and travelling around the world, she got a deep understanding and knowledge of literature to write the present book: “Birds, Birds, Birds: A Comparative Study of Medieval Persian and English Poetry, especially Attar’s Conference of Birds, The Owl and the Nightingale, Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls and The Canterbury Tales”, in which she compares these medieval literary masterpieces of the East and the West.

In this collection of poems, among his very best, Chaucer showcases his lyrical skills to perfection. Verging from tragic to comic, the overriding theme of the poetry is love, in its many guises. Chaucer tells of his passion for reading, which allows him to eavesdrop on a "parliament of birds" on St Valentine's Day; he tells how he, as an inveterate reader, forsakes his books on the first of May to wander into the fields; he complains of being short of money; and he complains to his scribe for copying his verses badly. All in all, in the course of the poetry he reveals a lot about himself, and does so throughout in an engaging and civilized manner.

This volume presents annotated texts of two poems that have not appeared in a previous critical edition. They are specimens of noncourtly minor poetry; the bird convention which links them is formulaic rather than experimental, their mode is predictable, their outlook decidedly conventional. A publication of the Renaissance English Text Society.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.