Animals are to be found in many places and modes in Chaucer’s work. They feature as similes (Palamon and Arcite in the Knight’s Tale are compared to lion, tiger and boar), star in fables (the Nun’s Priest’s Tale) or are simply themselves, like the cow of the lyric Truth, or the spider of the Treatise on the Astrolable. Heeding Lisa Kiser’s caution that animals in literature risk being absorbed into the human mindset, this essay explores some of the animals (and insects) found in Chaucer, and, by reading them alongside Isidore of Seville’s definition of ‘beast’, seeks to demonstrate how they resist such absorption and instead steer our attention to aspects of daily life or concepts we are liable to overlook. Animals may act as vehicles for our thoughts, but sometimes they carry us to places we did not consciously intend.

Any discussion of teaching is necessarily closely related to the constraints and freedoms offered by the system and community in which one teaches, so it is probably useful to begin this reflection on teaching with a brief description of my current position. I do not wish to suggest that my position is in any way unusual, quite the opposite; I offer what follows in the belief that many will see much they recognize here and in the hope that some may find it useful. My university, the University of Liverpool, is a large civic university in the north-west of England. We offer three-year BA honours programmes, a variety of MA programmes and have roughly forty doctoral students on the books at any one time, researching a wide range of subjects from medieval to contemporary literature, from historical or linguistic language work to the theory and practice of teaching English as a foreign language. While our BA is available for full-time study only, many of our postgraduates study on a part-time basis. We have a noticeable constituency of local students, ‘local’ meaning those whose permanent home address lies within Merseyside or Cheshire (an area which, pleasingly for lovers of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, includes the Wirral). These students could commute from home to the main campus on a daily basis with journey times of around an hour, although many of the younger ones prefer to live in student houses with their peers rather than at home with their parents.

Students taking modules in English may be following single honours degree programmes, or joint (a 50/50 split of English and another subject) or combined (three subjects in the first year, two thereafter). We operate a modular system and do not distinguish between these three types of student in this modular provision, which means that any given seminar group is likely to contain students from all three types of degree programme.

THIS ARTICLE deals with the clouds which give the medieval mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing its name. Rather than being solely metaphorical, the clouds of forgetting (beneath the contemplative) and unknowing (above and affected by light) have much in common with clouds as explained by contemporary books of popular science, such as Sidrak and Bokkus and John Trevisa's On the Properties of Things. This demonstrates how these medieval texts exemplify the blending of scientific and literary modes recently advocated by Gould (2003). In general, these religious and scientific texts combine factual observation, deduction and religious interpretation with direct human response to the natural world to arrive at a whole understanding of the physical and metaphysical world. In this these works share common ground with current green thinking. Broadly speaking, greens promote the value of the non-human in terms which do not require ‘nature’ to be subservient to, or have existence solely within, a human value-system.

Clouds appeal: witness the popularity of Richard Hamblyn's The Invention of Clouds (2001) and Gavin Pretor-Pinney's The Cloudspotter's Guide (2006). Both can be classed as ‘popular science’ since they address a general audience by providing hard scientific (meteorological) information alongside lighter matter: in Hamblyn's case biography, in Pretor-Pinney's joyous appreciation of natural phenomena. Each attests the enduring appeal of clouds as fascinating but somehow ultimately unknowable, despite meteorology's careful categorization of their causes, forms and effects. These books highlight the science, but they also maintain the clouds of our imaginations both as white puffs (‘our fluffy friends’) and dark banks (cumulonimbus is ‘the Darth Vader of clouds’) (Pretor-Pinney 2006, 45). They also reinforce an association of clouds with metaphor which seems almost automatic and is perhaps linked to the habit of seeing shapes in clouds like Polonius (Hamlet 3.3.366–72) or Antony in Antony and Cleopatra (4.12.1–22). Hamblyn's subtitle, How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, is in a similar vein while his prose asserts an explicit link between clouds and language in terms which make claims for meteorology as a literary form as much as a science: