THE BIRDS THAT FLY AND SING through my five chapters have enacted, provoked and evaded transformations. Metaphor – indeed, all forms of human translation – is repeatedly at stake, empowered and limited through its various and tangled involvements with the avian real. In Chapter One, birds mobilised a paradoxical metaphor, aiding those transfigurations most desired in orthodox Christian doctrine. In Chapter Two they mystified scholastic attempts to decode their diversity of kinds that ‘be not distinguyd in certayne’, escaping or thwarting human transformative designs upon the natural world. Elsewhere, they managed curious frictions between biological and cultural species traits with comic aplomb, manipulating and resisting their assigned roles in literary modes to reverse or redirect humanised taxonomies of species and voice. In the final chapter, we ended with the most substantial and dramatic of all avian transformations, simultaneously dispersive and integrative mutations that ‘bringen forth of briddes kinde’ (CA, IV.3119).

Studies of the sort I offer here run an unavoidable risk. Those who consciously and rigorously attempt to write about the nonhuman are paradoxically forced to recognise that they always do write about the human. As Erica Fudge comments, in these cases ‘we read humans writing about animals’, and (even if we do claim to address the animal purely as itself) we must process these writings through our own human faculties. To borrow the words of another writer on birds, there is a ‘sense in which a book like this on birds is really about ourselves’. I do not intend, however, that the title of this book should be misleading. I maintain that birds are, in fact, my proper focus because their materiality is always evident and deeply relevant. Their presence reveals intertwined human–avian histories and existences that can and do suggest an interdependence or compatibility that makes the bird integral, not marginal, to our self-conceptions. It would be entirely false, of course, to suggest that the birds I discuss are not symbolic, metaphoric or anthropomorphic, or that medieval people were not users of birds in the traditional sense.