Hawking Women Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture, Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture, Ohio State University Press, 2023.
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.
“Women.” The Chaucer Encyclopedia, edited by Richard Newhausen et al., Wiley-Blackwell, 2023, Vol. 4, pp. 1970-75.
This paper assesses structures of power through the medieval practice of falconry, offering two considerations about how feminist studies and animal studies fruitfully converge: first, assessing a human-animal relationship helps dismantle patriarchal control when human handler stands for patriarch and subjugated animal stands for domesticated woman. Second, this particular human-animal relationship represents a feminist poetics. In addition to overturning misogynous comparisons between falcons and women, something more pointedly self-representational occurred when women were themselves depicted as falconers. Rather than a human-animal relationship standing in for a man-woman relationship, men seem to be out of the foreground, or even out of the picture altogether. Instead, women are represented in both positions— as human handler and as animal. Material history also supports these representations, as many medieval women participated in falconry directly and used the image on personal objects, such as seals. Examining the figure of the female falconer on women’s seals, in conduct manuals, and in narrative poems, the essay argues that the result of this self-representation is a kind of sovereignty through reading practice
“‘As faucon comen out of muwe’: Female Agency and the Language of Falconry.” Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication, edited by Alison Langdon, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018, pp. 31-50.
This essay traces the literary history of a metaphor comparing a molting falcon to a changeable woman. The chapter focuses on both the familiarity of falconry training among medieval readers and the metaphor’s movement among different genres. Attending to the language of plumage in falconry manuals, I trace the metaphor from Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century romance Cligès, to the thirteenth-century fabliau Guillaume au faucon, to Guillaume de Machaut’s fourteenth-century allegory Le dit de l’alerion, and finally to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. I argue that the literary history of the mewed-falcon trope troubles essentializing claims about women’s “nature” by using the nonhuman communication of birds’ plumage to figure a feminist resistance.
This essay looks to the material realm of falconry to articulate how poetic language can possess “weight,” which is, for Roman Jakobson, a constitutive category for detecting “poeticity.” I argue that poetic weight entails a negotiation of control among poet, poem, and reader and resembles weight as it is described in medieval falconry manuals. These manuals exalt control of weight as the primary method for training birds to y beautifully. The makeup of falconry treatises like Frederick II’s De arte venandi cum avibus, including their marginal illuminations and vernacular and verse forms, shows an increasingly explicit awareness of the overlapping artistic aims of both falconry and poetry. Reading these thirteenth-century falconry manuals as poetics treatises, I show how falconry’s paradox of control and release gives language to an otherwise unexpressed medieval understanding of poetic textual encounter.
This essay examines representations of the womb across late medieval and early modern performance. The N-Town Mary Plays and the Elizabethan tragedy Gorboduc are separated by less than a century, but are rarely examined in light of one another. Using microhistorical methods and formal textual analysis, the essay zooms in on the trope of the womb across the theological divide separating these plays. It argues that these representations demonstrate a consistent and ambivalent connection between the mind and womb, a connection that does not subordinate one part of the body to another, but instead makes visible a dialectical relationship between the two. Examining literary representations of the individual and social experiences of premodern pregnancy, the essay seeks to offer a complementary approach to historical archival methods.