While critical discourse about falconry metaphors in premodern literature is dominated by depictions of women as unruly birds in need of taming, women in the Middle Ages claimed the symbol of a hawking woman on their personal seals, trained and flew hawks, and wrote and read poetic texts featuring female falconers. Sara Petrosillo’s Hawking Women demonstrates how cultural literacy in the art of falconry mapped, for medieval readers, onto poetry and challenged patriarchal control. Examining texts written by, for, or about women, Hawking Women uncovers literary forms that arise from representations of avian and female bodies. Readings from Sir Orfeo, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and hawking manuals, among others, show how female characters are paired with their hawks not to assert dominance over the animal but instead to recraft the stand-in of falcon for woman as falcon with woman. In the avian hierarchy female hawks have always been the default, the dominant, and thus these medieval interspecies models contain lessons about how women resisted a culture of training and control through a feminist poetics of the falconry practice.
Author(s): Sara Petrosillo
Series: Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 214
City: Columbus
Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture by Sara Petrosillo
Half Title page
Series Title page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION • Falconry Culture as Reading Practice
CHAPTER 1 • Control: Aesthetics of Training in Frederick II’s De arte venandi cum avibus
HAWKING VERSUS HUNTING
AESTHETICS OF FALCONRY
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF CATEGORIES
CHAPTER 2 • Release: Sexual Dimorphism as Poetic Form in the Sonnet “Tapina in me”
“TAPINA IN ME” AND THE VATICAN CANZONIERE
SIGILLOGRAPHIC IMAGERY
AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE LOVE-LOSS NARRATIVE
CHAPTER 3 • Enclosure: Reading Marie de France’s Yonec through the Harley 978 Hawking Treatise
TO KEEP AND TO WATCH IN THE HARLEY HAWKING TREATISE, FOLS. 116V–117R
MARIE’S YONEC: AUTHORING HER OWN ENCLOSURE
CHAPTER 4 • Seeling: Sir Orfeo’s Heurodis and Memory Training in the Auchinleck Lay
SEELING AND SELF-MUTILATION IN FALCONRY
HEURODIS AND THE PROBLEMS OF MEMORY
HAWKING HEURODIS
LOOKING BACK TO EURYDICE
CHAPTER 5 • Mewing: Molting the Literary Trope of the Changeable Woman in Adultery Narratives
BIRDS OF A FEATHER IN CLIGÈS
SHEDDING FEATHERS: FAUCON FROM FABLIAU TO ROMANCE
MEWING IN ALLEGORY: MACHAUT’S LE DIT DE L’ALERION
CRISEYDE IN AND OUT OF MEW
CONCLUSION • Healing: Squire’s Tale, Metonymy, and Female Falconers
APPENDIX • A Guide to Terminology
THE BIRDS
RAPTOR LIFE CYCLE
FALCONRY ACCOUTREMENTS
FALCONRY ACTIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Series page
