SOURCE: Hieatt, Constance B. “A Full Length Study of The Owl and the Nightingale.” Mosaic 10, no. 1 (fall 1976): 147-50.

In the following essay, Hieatt reviews Kathryn Hume's The Owl and the Nightingale: The Poem and Its Critics, praising this work as a systematic updating of contemporary scholarly debate on the poem.

That Kathryn Hume's book on The Owl and the Nightingale¹ is the first full length study of the poem may come as a surprise to two rather different groups, those who wonder why anyone would bother to write a book about a work from such an early period in our literature that it is likely to attract only a few advanced students and scholars, and, for opposite reasons, those who agree with Professor Hume that this poem “clearly belongs among the handful of major Middle English poems” and who know that it has been the focus of an...