Hawking Women

“Falconry in Hawking Women touches on so many topics: the strange intimacies of memory training that bonded a bird with its handler, gender hierarchies, and especially the entangled freedom and constraint of poetics. Petrosillo’s rich practical knowledge of the sport illuminates a key component of medieval literature.” —Karl Steel, author of How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages

“Petrosillo offers lively and fresh readings of familiar texts, demonstrating that the established analogy of hawks and women as seen in medieval romances has been too easily read as simple allegory, and in fact the power relations between falconer and bird offer more scope for female agency than hitherto acknowledged.” —Gillian Rudd, author of Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature

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 is an engaging and fascinating read … [Petrosillo] captures the reader with original linguistic context as displayed through translations, prose, and analysis, leaving the reader with much to consider in terms of falconry practices, aesthetics, and poetics.” —Leslie S. Jacoby, Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies

“Petrosillo’s methodology is clear and coherent and the journey she takes the reader upon is both fascinating and instructive … As such, Petrosillo’s contribution is a worthy and welcome one, inviting further paths to explore and understand the actuality of premodern female undertaking and agency.” —Zita Eva Rohr, Parergon

“Hawking Women makes the argument that medieval, fourteenth-century falconry manuals shed light into the means for a new understanding of how poetic language works, and even more striking, how it works as a representation of women, female empowerment, and the necessary skill and patience of an expert falconer. … Faculty and students will gain a fresh perspective about oft-taught literary texts to generate new and lively classroom discussions and further literary studies.” —Jeffery Moser, Rocky Mountain Review

“I would recommend this book to anyone who is studying, researching, or very interested in medieval gender, falconry and literature … Petrosillo is clear in her discussion of the specific, in-depth medieval literature she focuses on to draw a connection from falconry to poetry and gender and to make the practical knowledge of falconry visible in a literary context.” —Ellen Hagen, H-Environment

Sara Petrosillo is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Evansville.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction    Falconry Culture as Reading Practice

Chapter 1        Control: Aesthetics of Training in Frederick II’s De arte venandi cum avibus

Chapter 2        Release: Sexual Dimorphism as Poetic Form in the Sonnet “Tapina in me”

Chapter 3        Enclosure: Reading Marie de France’s Yonec through the Harley 978 Hawking Treatise

Chapter 4        Seeling: Sir Orfeo’s Heurodis and Memory Training in the Auchinleck Lay

Chapter 5        Mewing: Molting the Literary Trope of the Changeable Woman in Adultery Narratives

Conclusion      Healing: Squire’s Tale, Metonymy, and Female Falconers

Appendix        A Guide to Terminology

Bibliography

Index