SOURCE: Potkay, Monica Brzezinski. “Natural Law in The Owl and the Nightingale.” The Chaucer Review 28, no. 4 (1994): 368-83.

Suggests that “the legal system which grounds the arguments of the Owl and the Nightingale is a theoretical one, that of natural law."

The Owl and the Nightingale, as enigmatic as it is amusing, has occasioned disagreements among its readers almost as lively as the squabbles between the two birds. A chief point of contention concerns the poem's relation to contemporary legal practice. For the birds employ a legal vocabulary, plead in alternating speeches as was the practice in medieval law courts, construct their arguments as if they were legal cases, and quote authorities to buttress their positions. The poem's first modern editor, Wilhelm Gadow, suggested in 1907 that the birds' exchange of charges and countercharges reflects the judicial practice of the author's day.¹ Gadow's suggestion prompted later scholars to establish a...