SOURCE: Carson, Joan. “Rhetorical Structure in The Owl and the Nightingale.” Speculum 42 (1967): 92-103.

In the following essay, Carson evaluates The Owl and the Nightingale as an example of deliberative oratory designed to emphasize the intellectual and rhetorical merits of its presumed author, Nicholas of Guildford.

The various interpretations of the debate in The Owl and the Nightingale have given rise to more differences of opinion than exist between the protagonists of the poem. Comment has been voiced with more accord, however, upon the question of the poem's being a plea for preferment for Nicholas of Guildford. On the basis of “the nature and the persistency of the allusions,” Atkins holds that the author's main object “was to commend the case of Nicholas to the proper quarters for preferment.”¹ More recently, R. M. Lumiansky arguing in support of the thesis that the plea for Nicholas is the main object...