Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture: Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
Autor Sara Petrosilloen Limba Engleză Hardback – 31 ian 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.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215487
ISBN-10: 0814215483
Pagini: 216
Ilustrații: 11 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.4 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
ISBN-10: 0814215483
Pagini: 216
Ilustrații: 11 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.4 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
Recenzii
“A fascinating exploration … Hawking Women is an astute and rewarding volume that is as successful in its study of medieval falconry as it is in its stimulating readings of a satisfying range of medieval texts. Scholars of medieval romance will find much to appreciate in this work, which combines well conducted close readings with excellent engagement with secondary scholarship.” —Randy P. Schiff, The Medieval Review
“This is a monograph that asks for its readers’ sharpened attention, and provides the specialist tools with which to accomplish that sharpening, including a careful and welcome list of falconry terminology.“ —Alexandra Paddock, Review of English Studies
"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 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
"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
“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
Notă biografică
Sara Petrosillo is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Evansville. She is the author of Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture.
Extras
Hawking Women argues that in their instructions for the physical training of birds, medieval falconry manuals offer a means of understanding how poetic language works, and particularly how it works to represent women. The power of poetic language and the experience of watching a trained bird fly do not seem, at the outset, to have much in common. But even today we see evidence of the perceived connection between the two. A 2015 performance at the American Academy in Rome brought hawks and books together physically when artist Francesca Grilli released three falconry birds into the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library amid readers of history and poetry books. Grilli’s performance juxtaposes the wild yet trained birds with books and readers to “reflec[t] on the double meaning of liberation and constraint.” Constrained by leather straps on their feet as well as by their training to the glove, falconry birds are temporarily liberated when released for flight. A poetic tradition celebrating those fleeting moments and begun in the pre-Islamic Arab world continues today in the United Arab Emirates, where falconers convene annually with trained birds on the glove to participate in an encomiastic poetry competition lyricizing their hawks’ flying abilities. But the intersection of poetry and falconry is not limited to hawks as only the subject matter of verses. In a 2014 interview, author of H Is for Hawk Helen Macdonald identifies control as the hinge between training a bird and composing a poem: “You have to invest yourself in something and work with it until you relinquish all control over it. That moment is deeply satisfying. The point when [. . .] a poem you’re revising clicks, fits together, and locks you out. In falconry you put all of your heart and hard-won skills into training the hawk, then cast it from your fist to fly free. Then all you can do is stand and watch, and wonder.” The specific kind of wonder Macdonald invokes relies on contradictory concepts of control and release. The paradox of control and release in falconry has a rich hermeneutic history in medieval culture, where an essential third component surfaces: gender.
This book outlines a medieval poetics of control arising from a culture of training hawks and women into apparent submission. Because one species controls another in the practice of falconry, it has inflected metaphors exploring control among humans, and especially between lovers. As a species that required constant training to keep them loyal—that is, to keep them from flying away and staying away—falconry birds inspired poets to map the entire enterprise of falconry training onto women’s behavior in love relationships. Such falconry metaphors seem to index the antifeminist trope of exerting control over inherently defiant women, though they are never as clear as one might think. For example, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath appears to suggest that men can train lovers with bait as if women were hungry hawks: “With empty hand men may non haukes lure”. But even this seemingly straightforward metaphor, when considered in the context of the surrounding lines, makes it impossible to discern who is training whom. The Wife continues: “For wynning wolde I al his lust endure / And make me a feyned appetit”. When the metaphorical hawk feigns hunger, it also feigns ability to be lured, and thus ability to be trained. What the Wife is actually suggesting here is that the hawk itself trains man to believe the hawk can be trained. The end result is the same: the hawk profits, wins, or gets a full crop; yet, as the Wife suggests, the hawk uses man’s desire to train it in order to train man itself.
Cuprins
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
Descriere
Uniting feminist, formalist, and material historical approaches, explores how symbolic and literal hawking women resisted patriarchal control in medieval culture.