ABSTRACT
In the Parliament of Fowls the narrator falls asleep having read Cicero's Dream ofScipio. This Roman civic poem offers advice for the young statesman (Scipio) and introduces from the outset a political frame of reference for the dream that follows. The narrator of the Parliament encounters Africanus, Scipio's grandfather, who introduces him to the kind of delightful garden that is typical of many medieval dream visions. In the garden he discovers, inter alia, the temple of Venus, a place of unfulfilled and destructive sexual desire, before discovering an assembly of birds gathered around the figure of Nature. This is the parliament of fowls, meeting on Valentine's day, to debate the issue of choosing a suitable mate for a female eagle, after which all the birds of the various lower ranks will find their respective partners under the benevolent guidance of Nature. Three eagles court a single female and this situation threatens deadlock, preventing the other birds, who must wait until the eagles' affairs are dealt with, from being able to find their mates. Fortunately, however, the deadlock is overcome by the three eagles accepting Nature's advice that they wait another year for the female's decision. In order to appreciate the kind of political issues at stake in the poem and how these relate to the subject of decadence, it is necessary to consider in detail how Chaucer uses and alters his source texts, beginning with the figure of Nature.
