HAWKING WOMEN : falconry, gender, and control in medieval literary culture

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. Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture by Sara Petrosillo 1 Half Title page 3 Series Title page 4 Title page 5 Copyright page 6 Dedication 7 CONTENTS 9 ILLUSTRATIONS 11 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 13 INTRODUCTION • Falconry Culture as Reading Practice 15 CHAPTER 1 • Control: Aesthetics of Training in Frederick II’s De arte venandi cum avibus 38 HAWKING VERSUS HUNTING 44 AESTHETICS OF FALCONRY 51 THE CONTRADICTIONS OF CATEGORIES 61 CHAPTER 2 • Release: Sexual Dimorphism as Poetic Form in the Sonnet “Tapina in me” 68 “TAPINA IN ME” AND THE VATICAN CANZONIERE 71 SIGILLOGRAPHIC IMAGERY 82 AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE LOVE-LOSS NARRATIVE 89 CHAPTER 3 • Enclosure: Reading Marie de France’s Yonec through the Harley 978 Hawking Treatise 94 TO KEEP AND TO WATCH IN THE HARLEY HAWKING TREATISE, FOLS. 116V–117R 97 MARIE’S YONEC: AUTHORING HER OWN ENCLOSURE 103 CHAPTER 4 • Seeling: Sir Orfeo’s Heurodis and Memory Training in the Auchinleck Lay 117 SEELING AND SELF-MUTILATION IN FALCONRY 122 HEURODIS AND THE PROBLEMS OF MEMORY 128 HAWKING HEURODIS 137 LOOKING BACK TO EURYDICE 141 CHAPTER 5 • Mewing: Molting the Literary Trope of the Changeable Woman in Adultery Narratives 147 BIRDS OF A FEATHER IN CLIGÈS 149 SHEDDING FEATHERS: FAUCON FROM FABLIAU TO ROMANCE 151 MEWING IN ALLEGORY: MACHAUT’S LE DIT DE L’ALERION 160 CRISEYDE IN AND OUT OF MEW 167 CONCLUSION • Healing: Squire’s Tale, Metonymy, and Female Falconers 181 APPENDIX • A Guide to Terminology 193 THE BIRDS 193 RAPTOR LIFE CYCLE 194 FALCONRY ACCOUTREMENTS 195 FALCONRY ACTIONS 196 BIBLIOGRAPHY 199 INDEX 209 Series page 215 "Uses readings from Sir Orfeo, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Machaut, and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, among others, to uncover literary forms that arise from representations of avian and female bodies and to demonstrate how cultural literacy in the art of falconry mapped onto poetry and challenged patriarchal control"-- Provided by publisher