| Abstract | Paper -a:
In late medieval literature, the bodies of characters who engage in behaviors considered to be unnatural are, paradoxically, often associated with animalistic and natural imagery. I argue that the animality of these characters' bodies reveals that their behavior is, in reality, quite natural. In Chaucer's Miller's Tale, Alisoun, the sexually adventurous heroine, is described as 'fair... as any wezele' (3231), and, in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the lustful giant is 'grenned as a greyhound' (1075) and 'harsk as a hound-fish' (1084). The use of such descriptions encourages us to read these characters' bodies in terms of the natural so that we may then invert our inclination to find their behavior unnatural.
Paper -b:
Focusing on the destruction of the forest in Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, this paper addresses non-human bodies produced by human violence. Drawing on Judith Butler, I argue that romance offers a place for reshaping how we recognize what bodies are perceived as worthy of mourning by assessing frameworks of mournability. Chaucer's text forces readers to see all bodies as mourn-able, even those that do not have the fortune to be mourned. While those within the text may be able to ignore the mass destruction of the forest and the reverberations of this ecological catastrophe, the narrator makes it impossible for readers to do the same.
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