Yet the voice of the nightingale came to represent human longing in a variety of aspects longing so intense that it crosses the boundaries of sacred and secular, allowing the small creature to carry a surprising amount of symbolic weight. The voices of birds were thus cast as both like and unlike human speech, somehow in between human and bestial, and while they may seem similar to human voices, they could not be accepted as the same. 1 While the voice-human and avian-is related to the spirit, rising aloft into the air, birds also have a privileged position in the heavens, literally rising over the heads of Earth-bound humanity-as for example the dove, who came to represent the Holy Spirit (Marchesin 50-51). Michael Warren looks at how the voices of birds had to be carefully distinguished from human speech in order to differentiate the two: “birds’ voices only seem like human voices, but do not actually have the same rational, divinely-gifted properties” (Warren 17). Two recent books have looked at the importance of birds in medieval texts, emphasising both the centrality of birds’ vocal capacities and the place of birds as music-makers in an anthropocentric model. An unprepossessing small, brown creature, the nightingale’s interest for authors is closely linked to its voice, which takes on an importance that is inversely proportional to the creature’s diminutive size and unremarkable plumage. 2 As has been examined by a number of modern scholars: Gellinek-Schellekens, The Voice of the Nightin (.)ġNightingales appear more frequently than other birds in medieval literary texts ( Pfeffer 89), yet this textual abundance contrasts with the bird’s scarcity in its natural setting: the nightingale is a migratory creature who is only present and vocal for a brief season in certain areas ( Cramp 627-631).1 My thanks are due to Michael Warren for his kind generosity in sending me several chapters of his b (.).