Abstract: Scholarship on The Owl and the Nightingale has never offered a substantial eschatological interpretation of the poem. This article makes such an interpretation based on the poem’s uses of “dom(e)” and “unker” and manuscript contexts with religious verse concerned with death and Judgment Day. Its arguments make use of Micah Goodrich’s reading of the owl-as-Jew and Adrienne Williams Boyarin’s conception of the unmarked Jewess. The destabilizing effect of not knowing what either bird represents, paired with internal and external evidence for anxieties surrounding Judgment Day, suggest that we should be reading this avian debate poem as a form of preparation for further self-reflection before the Christian Judgment. Close readings of the poem, its manuscript context, and current scholarship on the “polemics of sameness” make such an eschatological argument possible.
Carla María Thomas (Sun,) studied this question.