SOURCE: Palmer, R. Barton. “The Narrator in The Owl and the Nightingale: A Reader in the Text.” Chaucer Review 22, no. 4 (1988): 305-21.

In the following essay, Palmer analyzes the function of the narrator in The Owl and the Nightingale, examining how the poem eludes interpretation.

The appearance of Kathryn Hume's full-length study of the difficulties of interpretation posed by the Middle English Owl and the Nightingale has effectively silenced what had been, for the last three decades or so, a lively (if chaotic) debate over the meaning of the poem. Since Hume's persuasive debunking of a wide variety of previous hermeneutic claims in 1975, no new thoroughgoing reading, in fact, has been proposed. Thus her own view that this literary debate is a burlesque-satire which takes as its object “human contentiousness” has been unchallenged.¹ Though I agree with Constance Hieatt that Hume has performed a “much-needed job of house-cleaning” by...