Hawking Women

Sara Petrosillo's monograph probes how medieval thinkers recognized and articulated the complex power dynamic between hawks and their human handlers. It further asks how these dynamics inhere in medieval poetics and reading practice. In doing so, it explores a feminist potential for collaborative relation between human and animal, in which each can maintain self-sovereignty, even as both become extensions of the other. Considering how medieval falconry manuals and images of hawking offer a fresh lens for interpreting literary texts, Petrosillo's focus is primarily on Italian, French, and English work spanning the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. Yet she also draws on her own experience with the sport, drawing lines of continuity between the Middle Ages and the present day.Hawking Women explores how hawks and women were imbricated in medieval culture, first through analogy or metaphor—the female object of romantic pursuit as a hawk to be tamed and contained—and second in literary treatments of women engaged in hawking, one of the only sports available to them. For Petrosillo, the entwinement of women and hawks in medieval culture indexes tensions around control and points to a paradox: the ways that female figures might be “in control while under control” (p. 3). In articulating this paradox, Petrosillo's argument aligns with the feminist scholarship of medievalists like Suzanne Edwards, Carissa Harris, and others, whose work probes medieval treatments of rape, assault, and domestic violence. Petrosillo's analysis acknowledges this violence and extends such work into critical Animal Studies, augmenting the arguments of scholars like Karl Steele and Peggy McCracken by “problematiz[ing] the traditionally hierarchical and entirely violent paradigm we might assume about a human-animal training relationship” (p. 14). Further, Petrosillo joins scholars of medieval literary and textual form like Seeta Chaganti and Arthur Bahr, asking how the gendered paradox of control articulated in medieval falconry is embedded in poetic composition and literary form.Hawking Women begins in chapter one with the mid-thirteenth-century hawking treatise, the Liber de arte venandi cum avibus (Book on the art of Hunting with Birds) by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, arguing that Frederick was the first to frame hawking as an art combining theoretical and practical knowledge. Such falconry treatises exert an “interspecies feminism” (p. 29) showing not just how the male falconer exerts control on the female bird, but also “the submission of the human handler to the training of a dominant female bird” (p. 29). Such training was immersive and made its way into medieval aesthetics. The tension between being in control while submitting to another mirrors medieval conceptions of literary form: the poet's thoughts gave form to the matter of poetry, even as such matter allowed the poet to have the thought, resulting in a dynamic interplay between the material and the immaterial. Similarly, falconry's form is “achieved through material practice,” making the flight of the falcon “something between rawness and artifice, materiality and immateriality” (p. 51). Its nature and shape imbued with the divinity of its Creator, its form is also shaped by human training.Next in chapter two, Petrosillo turns to a sonnet attributed to a female author known as “La Nina Siciliana” from Frederick II's Sicilian school of poetry and pairs this feminine lament at the release of a hawk with images of female falconers from personal seals. These representations of female falconers releasing their hawks offer a “feminist control” grounded in the sexual dimorphism of the hawk, that is, the female of the species's larger physical size. Rather than insisting on a romantic subtext for the sonnet, Petrosillo opens up the sonnet to interpretation as a female speaker's commentary on “the speaker's relationship with herself and her poetic voice” (p. 61), placing it within a larger historical context in which poetry turned toward self-reflexivity. The identity that emerges from the poem's speaker is composite and cooperative, intimately bound with the falcon she loves, trains, and releases in a kind of “symbiosis” (p. 65) that figures the bird as an extension of the falconer's body, a dynamic that is also evident in the sigillographic iconography of the thirteenth century.Petrosillo next turns in chapter three from poetic to manuscript form and from the thirteenth century Frederician court to a single thirteenth-century manuscript miscellany that includes a collection of Marie de France's lais. The chapter asks how the manuscript's inclusion of a hawking treatise might offer new ways of reading the poetry adjacent to it, especially Marie de France's Yonec. In its emphasis on proper means of enclosing captured hawks, Petrosillo argues, the hawking treatise offers a heuristic for space in the lais. Through its content and form, the hawking treatise offers what Petrosillo calls a “paradox of progressive diminishment” (p. 82), through which the hawk's physical enclosure enables an expansion of imagination as the reader anticipates the hawk's growth as a hunter and domestic companion. A preoccupation with this paradox also makes its way into Marie's lais, first in her prologue as she considers how the form of her poetry might enable or inhibit reader's ability to gloss it, and then in the lais themselves, as Marie invites readers to consider how glossing might offer women release from their own confining circumstances, often at the hands of ill-suited husbands.Chapter four shifts from Marie's Anglo-Norman romance to the Middle English romance of the Auchinleck manuscript, Sir Orfeo. Here, Petrosillo is interested in the central scene in which Orfeo recognizes his abducted wife among a party of women hawking. For Petrosillo, this scene reflects the memory training required by the practice of seeling—the controlled mutilation of the hawk by sewing its eyes shut—in ways that enable forms of agency in Heurodis, even as she endures violence. Grounded in a mnemonic theory that accentuated the place of light and brightness in memory-making, seeling required the falconer to temporarily darken the hawk's vision and slowly reintegrate light into its perception in order to facilitate the creation of new memories that would enable the hawk's successful work in cooperation with its human handler. Improper seeling could remind the hawk of its wild past and cause a frenzy of self-mutilation. Heurodis's self-mutilation upon her brief return from the fairy otherworld signals the fairy king's improper memory training and failure to fully acclimate Heurodis to the new environment of the fairy court. In accentuating her role as a badly trained hawk, Heurodis enables Orfeo's later recognition and rescue. This wordless lesson participates in a “calculated patience, which a culture of training supports” (p. 123), and it ultimately shows how Heurodis reframes herself as a hawking woman as much as a trained hawk.In her fifth and final chapter, Petrosillo turns to analogies between the molting hawk and the changeable woman in French and Middle English adultery narratives from Chrétien de Troyes to thirteenth-century fabliau and later to Machaut and Chaucer. Through these persistent analogies, Petrosillo uncovers an ambivalence toward adulterous women. They participate in misogynist stereotypes about feminine fickleness, yet they contain within them the conditions for feminist resistance to masculine control. Chrétien's Cligès illustrates the dangers of enclosing women and enclosing hawks by highlighting how they resist control when removed from enclosure. Yet in later adaptations of Chrétien's metaphor, the possibility of feminine resistance emerges through wordplay and semantic indeterminacy. Through close readings of the interplay between exterior adornment and interior change in the falcon/woman analogy, Petrosillo shows how Machaut's Le dit de l'alerion “recasts changeability as renewal” (p. 151). Set against the background of this trope, Chaucer's description of Criseyde in her romantic bliss as “fressh as faukon comen out of muwe” (in Troilus and Criseyde III.1783) is a “premature judgment” of Criseyde (p. 154). Yet, Criseyde's reiteration of the metaphor herself, saying she shall not be “hid in muwe” (IV.1310), places her in the tradition of the lady of the fabliau, seeking control over her own body and its interpretation.Petrosillo's moving conclusion offers a reading of Canacee and the injured female hawk in Chaucer's Squire's Tale, asking how women might have or be able to develop a knowledge of their birds that is unique to their sex, and also how male authors have represented this knowledge. Petrosillo acknowledges the danger of gender essentialism through this act of “saming” (p. 168) and its potential for reinforcing age-old tropes that deny humanity to women. Yet she negotiates these dangers by accentuating how medieval literature figures a metonymic rather than a metaphorical relationship between women and birds, a “relationship of contiguity rather than of subordination or substitution” (p. 169). For Petrosillo, the injured peregrine's lament about the tercelet's infidelity invites reflection on the falseness of metaphor and offers opportunity to read her “as something in between a metaphor and a lyrical speaker—an extension of both but not subordinate to either human character or semiotic service” (p. 172). Situated at a moment of metonymic interaction between Canacee and the peregrine, in which Canacee creates a mews for the falcon, the lament also invites consideration of the hawk as an extension of the woman.This book is firmly grounded in Literary Studies and will be valuable to scholars with an interest in poetics and literary form, but it also offers insights that will undoubtedly serve those interested in critical Animal Studies, ecocritical feminist and queer theory, histories of technique and practical knowledge, and other scholarly domains. The major strength of this book is its treatment of the textual and material culture around falconry, which draws attention to a little-studied archive that provides fresh readings of both canonical and noncanonical literary texts. Petrosillo's insights are mobile, offering new avenues of interpretation beyond what she addresses in her book. How, for example, might the “paradox of diminishment” explored in chapter three open up new ways of thinking about space and enclosure in anchoritic literature? If, as Petrosillo argues, the romance contexts of these texts move beyond the heterosexist framework of a woman's love for a man, how might they open up ways of thinking about a medieval auto-erotics—even an interspecies erotics—that can contribute to emerging work in queer Animal Studies? Resonating with contemporary works like Donna Haraway's Companion Species Manifesto, Petrosillo's personal experience with falconry animates the insights of this book, offering a model for cultivating through sport what Barbara Newman has recently called “the permeable self.” In sum, Petrosillo explains, “What falconry had actually provided for both men and women was a clearer understanding of dedication to a practice, submission to a training, and cooperation with another species” (p. 177)

Analogy · Medieval Literature · Medieval studies · Medievalism · Middle Ages · Poetics · Romance · Scholarship · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Medieval Literature and History