Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture 0814215483, 9780814215487

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H AW K I N G W O M E N

I N T E RV E N T IONS: N E W ST U DI E S I N M E D I E VA L C U L T U R E Ethan Knapp, Series Editor

HAWKING WOMEN •

Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture Sara Petrosillo

T H E O H I O S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S C O LUM BU S

Copyright © 2023 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Petrosillo, Sara, author. Title: Hawking women : falconry, gender, and control in medieval literary culture / Sara Petrosillo. Other titles: Interventions: new studies in medieval culture. Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2023] | Series: Interventions: new studies in medieval culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “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. Identifiers: LCCN 2022034927 | ISBN 9780814215487 (cloth) | ISBN 0814215483 (cloth) | ISBN 9780814282649 (ebook) | ISBN 0814282644 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Falconry in literature. | Women in literature. | Literature, Medieval— History and criticism—Theory, etc. Classification: LCC PR149.F32 P48 2023 | DDC 821/.1093579—dc23/eng/20220817 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034927 Other identifiers: ISBN 9780814258606 (paper) | ISBN 0814258603 (paper) Cover design by adam bohannon Text composition by Stuart Rodriguez Type set in Minion Pro

To Vincenzo, Olivia, and Annika

CONTENTS

•

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

INTRODUCTION

Falconry Culture as Reading Practice

CHAPTER 1

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

24

CHAPTER 2

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

54

CHAPTER 3

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

80

CHAPTER 4 Seeling: Sir Orfeo’s Heurodis and Memory Training CHAPTER 5

in the Auchinleck Lay

103

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

133

CONCLUSION Healing: Squire’s Tale, Metonymy, and

Appendix

1

Female Falconers

167

A Guide to Terminology

179

Bibliography

185

Index

195

I L LU ST R AT ION S

•

FIGURE 0.1

Photograph of reader and perched hawk in Francesca Grilli’s performance Gold Revolution

2

FIGURE 0.2

Fresco depicting Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, scene of courtly life

5

FIGURE 1.1

Detail of folio 1r of De arte venandi cum avibus, l’art de chace des oisiaus

39

FIGURE 2.1

Detail of folio 87v of De arte venandi cum avibus, l’art de chace des oisiaus

56

FIGURE 2.2

French copper alloy seal matrix of Elizabeth, Lady of Sevorc

70

FIGURE 2.3

Italian bronze seal matrix of Mas, wife of Antonio D’Lendaria

71

FIGURE 4.1

Detail of folio 113r of De arte venandi cum avibus, l’art de chace des oisiaus

111

FIGURE 4.2

Detail of folio 136v of De arte venandi cum avibus, l’art de chace des oisiaus

113

FIGURE 5.1

Detail of folio 68r of Guillaume de Machaut, Poésies

147

FIGURE 5.2

Detail of folio 76r of Guillaume de Machaut, Poésies

148

FIGURE 5.3

French ivory mirror case

158

• ix •

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

•

After first puzzling over the medieval nonchalance of falconry references, I found that my eyes were opened to hawks everywhere. From telephone wires, lines of poetry, dots in the sky, hawks accumulated in my field of vision and in my notes. Without the guidance, support, and probing of Seeta Chaganti, I would have been all hawk, no direction. Only such a dedicated mentor would go extra lengths to understand what questions to ask to narrow my clutch of ideas, reading my annotated copy of T. H. White’s The Goshawk, and accompanying me to a falconry center in the Sierra foothills so we could both feel the weight of a hawk on the glove. I am so grateful for her influence on my approach to poetry and medieval studies. Noah Guynn and Claire Waters inspired the comparative aspect of this project and offered invaluable feedback at every stage of research. Margaret Ferguson and Joshua Clover made it possible for me to speak of poetics and feminism in the same breath. The medieval authority on falconry, Frederick II, bears all the responsibility for my unceasing thoughts about one particular and monumental conundrum, the implications of which seem to have raised the patriarchal hackles of his contemporaries: “a largeness of body in females and on the contrary, smallness in males”—what biologists today call RSD, reversed sexual dimorphism. The academic community at the University of Evansville, in particular Mark Cirino, Kristina and Cris Hochwender, Robert Baines, Julie A. Merkle, and students in my Falconry and Nature in Literature course, allowed me the • xi •

xii

Acknowledgments

space to think through RSD’s implications for gendered language and power. I thank Sally McKee and Emily Albu for paleographic help, for laughter, and for bearing early witness to my encounter with Frederick II’s medieval Latin. I am so indebted to friends for their incisive feedback and encouragement, especially Katherine Leveling, Barbara Zimbalist, Nicole Kenley, Heather Jennings, Kristen Aldebol-Hazle, Amy Louise Morgan, and Emily Huber. I thank Alison Langdon, Wendy Matlock, Carolynn Van Dyke, and Roberta Magnani for inviting me to work through ideas in this book during our collaborations on ecofeminist projects and presentations. I am grateful to Anke Bernau and Karl Steel for discussing the project with me at various stages. I am also indebted to members of the Medieval Association of the Midwest for providing feedback on manuscript research. I am grateful for the assistance I received from archivists at the University of Bologna, the Vatican Library, the Huntington Library, and, above all, the State Archives of Brindisi, my second home and the place where Frederick II and his Mediterranean world came to life for me. Many falconers, but especially Marya Lehman and Jack Hubley, generously shared their craft with me to bring the raptor–human dyad from the folio to the field. Much of this archival and field work was made possible because of the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Research Fellowship and Summer Research Fellowships from the English Department at the University of California, Davis. Friends and family above all made the completion of this project possible. Mandi and Grant Glover, Anna Butterworth, Lora Alvey, Ayse Schablick, Warren Mathies, Mari Plikuhn, Katie J. Aldred, Daisy and Scott Mastroianni, Marsha Matsuura and Mori Costantino, Aya Costantino Kaplan, Jane Lee, Andrea Linney, Kim and Valerio Casonato, Paulette and John Booth, and Vincenzo, Olivia, and Annika Petrosillo, thank you for your unyielding patience and enthusiasm. I would like to thank anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful and comprehensive feedback helped shape the final direction of this book. I am in awe of my editor, Ana Maria Jimenez-Moreno, for her wisdom, ingenuity, and encouragement. Finally, I owe a great deal to the readers and editors of earlier iterations, from which parts of this book are derived: an article published in Exemplaria 29, no. 3 (2017): 195–209, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10412573.2017.1346392; an article published in Medieval Feminist Forum 54, no. 1 (2018): 9–33; and a book chapter published in Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representation of Interspecies Communication, edited by Alison Langdon, 2018, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

INTRODUCTION

•

Falconry Culture as Reading Practice

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 (see fig. 0.1). Grilli’s performance juxtaposes the wild yet trained birds with books and 1 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 identi

1. Grilli, Gold Revolution. • 1 •

2

Introduction

FIGURE 0. 1. Photograph of reader and perched hawk in Francesca Grilli’s performance Gold Revolution. Used with permission from Francesca Grilli. Photo credit Umberto Di Marino, Naples.

fies 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.”2 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

2. Macdonald, “H Is for Hawk: An Interview.”



Falconry Culture as Reading Practice

3

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” (III.415).3 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” (III.416–17). 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. Female figures throughout this book occupy such a double position, in control while under control. This gendered paradox of control aligns with studies of feminist scholars like Suzanne Edwards, who argues that “the figure of the raped or ravished woman models a subjectivity that accepts subordination and freedom as simultaneous rather than absolutely opposed.” 4 Hawking Women adds the genre of falconry treatises to the countertradition that Edwards traces. Like Peggy McCracken, who has argued that “literary texts use human-animal encounters to explore the legitimacy of authority and dominion over others,” this study identifies in writings about falconry an unsettling of the very concept of dominion.5 In comparing the subordination of female lovers to the training of hawks, Guillaume de Machaut’s fourteenth-century allegorical falconry treatise Le dit de l’alerion, explored at length in chapter 5, makes only one thing absolutely clear about the relationship between humans and birds of prey: the falconer is entranced by the allure of the hawk more than the hawk is ever lured by the falconer. This book situates representations of falconry training at the intersection of conduct books for women and poetics treatises in its feminist formalist approach to a material practice. The titular hawking women find a multiplicity of representations in medieval culture: in lyric and narrative poetry they are falconers with their own hawks, they are symbolized by female hawks themselves, and they occupy both positions; they are the addressees of hawking and conduct manuals; they choose to represent themselves with hawks in iconography; even their anatomy is symbolized by falconry birds, for metaphoric as well as philological reasons. The Old French pun faucon, which signifies both 3. Citations to the Wife of Bath’s Prologue in the Riverside edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales occur parenthetically in text by fragment and line number. 4. Edwards, Afterlives of Rape, 135. 5. McCracken, In the Skin of a Beast, 1.

4

Introduction

“falcon” and “false cunt,” imbued literary and visual references to falcons with a joke about the impossibility of control over female chastity. Most threatening to chastity’s knowability in these comparisons is the distance between falconer and falcon at the moment of the falcon’s stoop—its highest pitch—for what occurs in this detached space is unknown to the falconer. It is in this space that female sovereignty cannot be traced, thus rendering futile a male lover’s quest to ascertain his beloved’s chastity. In terms of a cultural symbol, then, falconry represents all that cannot be known and controlled regarding a female subject. When read into medieval narrative, the faucon, and the female genitalia it implicates, both resist legibility. In terms of a poetics, representations of female falconers with their own birds collapse the gendered metaphor and instead create an alternative signifying system, one that does not rely on the subjugation of one gender or one species to another but rather outlines the terms of autonomous female control. Even though traditional comparisons between training women and training hawks appear uniformly misogynous, the uncertain control inherent in the relationship between hawk and falconer suggests an unknowability in the human power dynamics behind these comparisons. One particular image helps triangulate poetry, love, and power by aligning human figures with three objects representative of each: a viol, a rose, and a hawk (fig. 0.2). This thirteenth-century Bassano fresco, “one of the first iconographic witnesses of the courtly and imperial convergence between amorous themes and falconry,” depicts a kneeling Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, his back turned to a performing troubadour, as he presents a rose to a hawking woman: his bride, Isabella of England.6 Frederick will feature in this book, for he composed the most comprehensive treatise on falconry in the Middle Ages, the Liber de arte venandi cum avibus (Book on the Art of Hunting with Birds). Besides compiling this meticulous account of falconry training and ornithological study, he patronized a school of poetry integral to the development of vernacular lyric expression across Europe, making this fresco an apt visual for the intersection of poetic composition, representations of women, and falconry training. Scholars have discussed how the fresco symbolizes “the translatio of the courtly song from the Occitan matrix to the 7 forms of the notarial ‘Sicilian’ School,” a group of poets who also “held official positions as notaries, judges, or falconers” in the Frederician curia.8 In fact, 6. Boccassini, Il volo della mente, 263. Translated from the Italian: “una delle prime testimonianze iconografiche della convergenza cortese e imperiale tra temi amorosi e falconeria.” 7. Boccassini, Il volo della mente, 263. Translated from the Italian: “la translatio del canto cortese dalla matrice occitana alle forme della Scuola notarile ‘siciliana.’” 8. Haskins, “Science at the Court of the Emperor Frederick II,” 671.



Falconry Culture as Reading Practice

5

FIGURE 0. 2. Fresco depicting Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, scene of courtly life, Palazzo Finco, Bassano del Grappa, Italy. Used with permission from Alca S.a.S. di Granzotto Paola.

Daniela Boccassini argues that the fresco’s depiction of Frederick, bearing only a rose and a faint regal lily, catalyzes Italian poetic separation from French troubadour tradition: “The musical-poetic element is present only as accom9 paniment, and no longer as the primary component of the situation.” For Boccassini the fresco depicts a rejection of poetry as a means to access aristocratic society in favor of the Frederician belief that poetry derives from innate nobility and needs no musical accessory. Likewise, Marisa Galvez observes that “the survival of a troubadouresque fresco, rather than a curial songbook, reflects Frederick’s desire to both appropriate and distance himself from the Occitan troubadour tradition.”10 Crucially, and imperative to the wider argument of this book, the Empress’s hawk visually counterbalances the position of the viol, supplanting troubadour song with falconry training, each tradition linked by the amorous rose at center. Yet while the gloved female figure in the fresco suggests such disciplined control and constraint, the hawk’s position conjures imminent flight. A medieval audience would have approached Empress Isabella’s avian companion with a mix of approval and trepidation. Scholars of medieval women’s education and of falconry agree that noblewomen were expected 9. Boccassini, Il volo della mente, 262. Translated from the Italian: “l’elemento poeticomusicale è presente solo come accompagnamento, e non più come componente primaria della situazione.” 10. Galvez, Songbook, 122.

6

Introduction

to know how “to breed falcons and release them during the hunt”11 and that “women not only flew falcons, but they cared for them.”12 Scholars base such claims on records of “queens and noblewomen employing falconers” and purchasing birds and falconry equipment, as well as records of women receiving payments for training falcons.13 They also look to descriptions from conduct manuals that include falconry in women’s educational programs starting in the High Middle Ages. For example, Robert de Blois’s thirteenth-century conduct manual Les chastoiement des dames instructs that the ideal lady “faucon, tercieul et esprivier / sout bien porter et afaitier” (265–66; should know well how to carry and train falcon, tiercel, and sparrowhawk).14 By suggesting that women receive education in the training of birds, and not simply the carriage of them, this conduct manual takes for granted that women could and should learn the complex theory and practice behind training. The variety of avian genders and species named also suggests a nuanced understanding of the different training and carriage methods for a range of birds, implying a belief in women’s capability to participate in and contribute to this active and experimental practice. While these lines may appear easily dismissed as simply listing courtly activities that build a lady’s noble education, their assumptions are helpful. The conduct manual does not question women’s intellectual or physical belonging in this arena, and this admission implies that the knowledge available to male falconers is also available to female falconers. For while the training of different genders and species of hawks varied, the gender of the trainer matters little: men and women both trained hawks according to the same precepts and tenets, which revolved around the anxious moment of release. While their small size made sparrowhawks optimal hunting partners for female falconers, like all birds of prey they naturally fear and avoid humans. Falconry manuals taught aspiring falconers to overcome this fear so that the birds would hunt with them, yet they also evince how the concept of control within falconry training is not straightforward. The training process was slow and incremental, gradually increasing the amount of freedom afforded to birds in flight. Falconry birds began training tethered to a cord, whose length increased until the falconer released the bird completely and hoped that it would return to the fist. A fourteenth-century falconry manual in Le Ménagier de Paris (a Parisian conduct book addressed to new wives) outlines the tension between control and release. Initial phases of training emphasize constant 11. Shahar, Fourth Estate, 152. 12. Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 118. 13. Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 118. 14. This quotation from Les chastoiement des dames is from the Fox edition. My translation.



Falconry Culture as Reading Practice

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control: “Les bons espreveteurs dient un tel proverbe: Au lier et au deslier / Te tien saisy de l’esprevier.” (3.2.29;15 Good austringers [trainers of hawks] repeat this proverb: “When attaching and detaching / Keep firm possession of the hawk.”)16 So the object of falconry is to fly the bird at game and thus release control but crucially not possession: Il convient reclamer en un secret lieu, petit a petit et de plus loing en plus loing, tant qu’il reviengne du loing de ses longes. Puis le couvient reclamer a la commande ou recrence, et puis en pluseurs lieux et en especial aux champs et es pres a recreance, et puis sans recreance. (3.2.388–93) [You must practice calling it back to the gauntlet in a secluded place, gradually from farther and farther away, so much that it returns from afar, attached to its longes [short leash]. Next you must call it back to the gauntlet using the commande or the creance [longer leash], and then in different places and especially in the fields and meadows, first with the creance and then 17 without.]

Herein lies a paradox: flying the bird is the endgame, but flying the bird means releasing control over it. The paradox of control in falconry helps us understand control between a human handler and an avian hunting partner, but it also elucidates the idea of describing how control functions as a concept in poetry. Falconry manuals’ focus on the play and tension between control and release informed premodern audiences’ awareness of a similarly necessary tension in artistic productions, especially those at “the intersection between poetics and action or prescription in the world.”18 As prescriptive texts, falconry manuals sit at this intersection, and so it will be helpful to contextualize them among “how-to” books in medieval culture and current critical discourse. Because falconry treatises and their esoteric terminology are not a part of our everyday lived experience, we might not think of treatises as doing anything more than explaining this medieval practice. We might presume that they perform only a denotative function rather than a poetic one, but Lisa H. Cooper has suggested that such “howto” texts which “proffer an extensive syllabus of practical knowledge” “might

15. Quotations from Le Mesnagier de Paris are from the Brereton and Ferrier edition and are cited in text by book, part, and line number. 16. Greco and Rose, Good Wife’s Guide, 238. 17. Greco and Rose, Good Wife’s Guide, 240. 18. Chaganti, Medieval Poetics of Social Practice, 3.

8

Introduction

be said to have a poetics.”19 However, the “intricate marriage of form and content” in “practical” medieval texts resides just beyond our immediate reach as moderns: “as the written traces of mostly vanished practices [. . .] medieval works of instruction have for us [. . .] always already been wrenched out of context.”20 And yet, Cooper argues, reading for the poetics in instructional 21 texts “might help us to read more profitably in and across other genres.” Seeta Chaganti goes even further in her study of medieval dance manuals. In an innovative treatment of dance and medieval poetry, she argues for more than an analogous relationship between the two arts: the practice of dance intersects with thought and form, rather than “exist[ing] in the infinite nonintersection of parallelism.”22 Her readings “construe poetic form not as comparable to dance but rather as constituted within the perceptual habits produced by dance.”23 This turn toward “cultural practices outside the realm of poetic reading” reveals “a reflective relationship between formal characteristics and intellectual imperatives at work elsewhere in the culture.”24 I suggest that falconry, too, performs both formal and intellectual work as an art that interacts with and influences poetic arts. Like falconry treatises, poetics treatises such as Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria (ca. 1175), Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria Nova (1200–1215), and John of Garland’s Parisiana poetria (ca. 1220) perform a descriptive and instructive function for “the initially untrained beginner [to progress] towards mastery of the art.”25 Besides this shared format “distil[ling] the precepts born of experience and observation,” both falconry and poetics treatises outline a medieval mode of shaping of artifice.26 Both kinds of treatises are interested in the conundrum of translating an aesthetic practice into practical instruction, in bridging “the art as a science or branch of knowledge and practice of it as a 27 technique.” In this, too, Frederick’s falconry treatise in particular shares formal aims with Geoffrey’s Poetria Nova, a connection further explored in chapter 1. Poetria Nova, a “Europe-wide bestseller and [. . .] the leading textbook of 19. Cooper, “Poetics of Practicality,” 492–93. 20. Cooper, “Poetics of Practicality,” 495. 21. Cooper, “Poetics of Practicality,” 493. 22. Chaganti, Strange Footing, 2. 23. Chaganti, Strange Footing, 3. 24. Chaganti, Strange Footing, 74. 25. Kelly, Arts of Poetry and Prose, 39. 26. James J. Murphy offers a definition of “preceptive grammar” treatises: a book that seeks “to provide advice for a writer wishing to compose verse in the future” (Rhetoric in the Middle Ages 135). 27. Kelly, Arts of Poetry and Prose, 59.



Falconry Culture as Reading Practice

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its kind for at least three centuries,” sought to instruct by example, employing poetic language to teach poetic concepts.28 Frederick’s falconry treatise, while not verse in form, employed new prescriptive techniques as well as highly crafted Latin prose to describe what had formerly been considered inexpressible instruction gleaned from practical experience only. And though poetics treatises are explicitly discursive—writing about writing—they are also indicative of social practice. Robin Hass Birky has examined “the arts of poetry in conjunction with gender and genre as constitutive parts of their discursive practice,” and my study joins Birky’s in valuing instructive treatises “as artifacts in their own right as social constructs, as both discursive practice and discourse.”29 Like many preceptive treatises, falconry treatises aim to translate a practice into a textual document. At the same time, falconry treatises stand apart from the work of other such manuals because of the material relationships they elucidate. And here, I do not mean only explicitly discursive treatises like Poetria Nova. Other ostensibly “practical” treatises such as hunting manuals describe the training of already domesticated hounds, but falconry treatises’ depiction of the material relationship between falconer and falcon problematizes the relationship between training and control, as introduced in the excerpt from the conduct book Le Ménagier de Paris. Conduct books join poetics and falconry treatises in their preceptive form, though the Ménagier is unique for its inclusion of a full-length falconry treatise, rather than the passing comments about expectations for women’s familiarity with falconry seen in Robert de Blois’s conduct manual. The Ménagier is a manual on household life addressed to a fifteen-year-old bride and narrated in the voice of her husband, and the book uses various methods to indoctrinate female readers and young wives, or to demonstrate to male readers the supposed tractability of young women. Much of the Ménagier contains medieval exempla of wifely obedience and feminine virtues within the frame of a conduct manual, resulting in an apparently thinly veiled antifeminist collection. Readers will recognize the stories of Griselda, Susanna, and Lucretia, to name a few. The manual’s subtle indoctrination is most effective in places that appear to slacken control by reframing its own purpose in generically confusing moments. The manual uses such confusion to internalize patriarchal control in its reader. For example, after recounting Lucretia’s suicide to demonstrate the lengths to which women should go to protect chastity and defamation, the narrator backtracks: “Ces choses, chiere suer, souffisent 28. Camargo, “Introduction,” 12. 29. Birky, “‘Word Was Made Flesh,’” 162.

10

Introduction

assez a vous baillier pour cest article, et vous sont bailliees plus pour raconte que pour dottrine” (1.4.383–85;30 These things, dear, are enough to impart to you for this article, and they are given to you more for the tale than for the teaching).31 This is a place that does not look like control, but it is. Because the tales are pleasurable, they might not appear an attempt at controlling, but they in fact use their own entertainment value to impart their moral conduct code to the reader. The Ménagier’s ten-folio hawking treatise, by contrast, looks like control, but is not. Critics tend to read the symbolism of a falconer enticing a wild animal to return to the fist as a metaphor for the message of the book: a husband must tame, rein in, and domesticate, a “fresh and frisky young wife.”32 In their introduction to an English translation of the treatise, Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose claim that “the analogy to training a wife seems clear.”33 They interpret the austringer (trainer of hawks) as an “older man” like the “aged narrator” who must “avoid allowing the hawk [the young wife] to become haughty or disdainful of its master’s dominance” or else face betrayal and “social ridicule.”34 When they allow that the austringer might be interpreted as the wife in an analogy, they offer a moral reading: the “humble wife” must “endure” her “abusive husband” just like the “austringer must endure the hawk’s talons.”35 Yet these readings don’t account for the fact that the austringer described in the manual is the wife, and the hawk is categorically female. The treatise thus allows female readers to take at face value the text’s suggestion that the tales are more for pleasure than for instruction, to recognize the pleasurable storytelling as a means of indoctrinating antifeminist messages, and to reject the indoctrination and thereby proclaim interiority a space beyond the control of male managers. In suggesting that the falcon–falconer relationship challenges the prescriptive form of conduct books, Hawking Women joins conversations about the ways that conduct books complicate ideas about gendered control. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark argue for the social and literary role of conduct books, and particularly the gender performances they reveal: “The conventional interpretation of conduct books is that they function in a straightforward, prescriptive mode, subjecting their readers to a hegemonic regime 30. Quotations from Le Ménagier de Paris are from the Brereton and Ferrier edition and are cited in text by book, part, and line number. 31. Greco and Rose, Good Wife’s Guide, 93. 32. Greco and Rose, “Introductory Note to Article 3.2,” Good Wife’s Guide, 231. 33. Greco and Rose, “Introductory Note to Article 3.2,” Good Wife’s Guide, 231. 34. Greco and Rose, “Introductory Note to Article 3.2,” Good Wife’s Guide, 231. 35. Greco and Rose, “Introductory Note to Article 3.2,” Good Wife’s Guide, 231.



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of behavior. But this view leaves untheorized the link between prescription and historical practice—a lack of theorization that has tended to obscure the interest and utility of conduct literature for our understanding of medieval culture.”36 Turning to texts specifically directed at women offers a different portrayal of falconry than that depicted in allegories, romance, and fabliaux. By presenting my readings of falconry in those more explicitly literary genres alongside a reading of a conduct manual, I hope to counter the critical tendency to exclude “conduct books from the literary canon[,] especially [.  .  .] conduct books addressed to women.”37 Hawking was perhaps one of the few rigorous outdoor activities available to aristocratic and mercantile-class medieval women,38 and the opening lines of the Ménagier hawking treatise suggest that a woman’s choice to engage in the activity might also extend to agency over choosing other, more private, diversions, such as reading and even sex. The husband-narrator begins the treatise with a declaration that foregrounds pleasure in the pursuit of falconry: “Je met cy apres ce que je say d’espreveterie, afin que en la saison vous vous y esbatiez se vostre plaisir y est” (3.2.3–4; I place hereafter what I know about being an austringer and the art of hawking, so that in the hunting season you 39 can divert yourself with this pursuit if you so choose). The narrator declares his purpose in including this hawking treatise in the Ménagier: to provide his young wife information about training birds so that she may divert herself with hawking. His choice of the verb esbatre predictably categorizes hawking as a noble pastime—not an activity designed for pragmatic purposes. This is an activity for the lady’s plaisir (“desire, will, pleasure”) alone.40 But the treatise’s introduction suggests that hawking is more than a diversion: the meanings of esbatre range from “to amuse, divert oneself ”41 to “to have sexual intercourse with.”42 Both esbatre and plaisir evoke a kind of purposeful erotic pleasure, and the direct address to the lady alone suggests a private pleasure between herself and her pursuit, whether hawking, or reading about hawking. Another meaning of esbatre suggestively aligns the lady with both the austringer and the bird; the verb may also mean “beat, set in motion (as of wings),”43 suggesting that the lady might find a kind of intersubjective pleasure 36. Ashley and Clark, Medieval Conduct, x. 37. Ashley and Clark, Medieval Conduct, x–xi. 38. Almond, Medieval Hunting, 159. 39. Greco and Rose, Good Wife’s Guide, 233. 40. Old French Dictionary, s.v. “Plaisir” (s.m.). 41. Old French Dictionary, s.v. “Esbatre” (v.r.). 42. Anglo-Norman Dictionary, s.v. “Esbatre” (1.v.n.). 43. Old French Dictionary, s.v. “Esbatre” (v.t.).

12

Introduction

in training the bird and watching it fly; that as it flies, she might also feel as though she too is set in motion on figurative wings. By suggesting that female readers interpret their own bodies as both the austringer and the hawk, the Ménagier makes a risky move that we see play out in depictions of hawking women throughout this book. Though the frame of the hawking treatise within the wider household manual may attempt to tame sexual activity, ultimately placing women under control of men, this section of the manual elides female austringer with female hawk. At one point, the manual overtly signals the exclusivity of the relationship between austringer and bird: “cellui ne le devroit laissier tenir ne paistre a autre fos a lui” (3.2.510–11; A hawk’s master should not allow anyone beside himself to hold or feed the bird).44 We might read this warning as an expression of anxiety about wives veering from their masters, or husbands. Yet, though the pronoun lui (himself) appears to signify a male subject, it merely refers to a masculine noun “maistre” (3.2.509). Attention to the female gender of the austringer, the “master,” in this hawking treatise, rather suggests that a woman place control over her sexual body in no one else but herself. The manual’s very proposal that a body, like a hawk, can be in and out of control allows women to use reading about hawking as a simulation of the kind of freedom afforded by actually practicing falconry. Thus, while the ideology of Le Ménagier de Paris is one of male management, a management that is both overt and interiorized, the hawking treatise therein offers readers, and especially female readers, an alternative way to interpret the indoctrination of the conduct book.45 The presence of the hawking treatise in this manual of wifely domestication allows female readers to apply falconry’s paradox of control and release to the management of their own bodies. Roberta Krueger argues that the excessive orderliness in the Ménagier clashes with moments of textual disorder, and I contend that the hawking treatise likewise shows how “this text opens a discursive space for the reader’s 46 reflection.” At stake in the Ménagier, as with other conduct manuals, is who has control over a female subject in both representation and practice. Glenn Burger’s study of conduct manuals suggests that a genre designed to impose rules for behavior might actually have supplied women with a more positive way to view their position: “For while a pervasive medieval antifeminist tradition views the female body as naturally wayward and sensual [. . .] late medieval conduct texts for women outline models of feminine virtue that show 44. Greco and Rose, Good Wife’s Guide, 242. 45. See Greco and Rose, Good Wife’s Guide, 27. 46. Krueger, “Identity Begins at Home,” 35.



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the good wife as an identity with positive effects in the world.”47 Even if the hawking manual in the Ménagier suggests a world at first limited to a lady and her hawk, that relationship contributes to the way in which “conduct texts for women reconfigure how female embodiment is understood in the period.”48 Falconry manuals deviate from conduct manuals in their emphasis on “embodied experiences” in enacting the virtues of a successful falconer, a phenomenon explored in chapter 4 through the depiction of hawking Heurodis in the lay Sir Orfeo.49 The hybrid nature of the Ménagier combines the more traditional conduct manuals, which Holly Crocker argues “dematerialize virtue, [making] it into a set of principles that can never be fully embodied,” with a hawking manual that relies on “particular acts” that might remedy or revise some of the “ways that [premodern conduct books] were problematic for women.”50 If we read references to falcons as indexing anxiety over adulterous or possibly illegible female subjects, then references to female falconers suggest a kind of regained agential control—if not through practice, then at least through how women are represented and interpreted. Like the Frederician fresco (fig. 0.2), textual representations of falconry often depict hawks and women together: women were falconers in their own right, but they were also symbolized by their avian partners. And here we arrive at a basic but fundamental detail about birds of prey: falconry birds are always female unless otherwise noted, and female hawks are always the dominant sex of the species, being larger and more powerful than their male counterparts. The particulars of this reversed sexual dimorphism are explored more fully in chapters 1 and 2, but its implications undergird my examination of hawking women throughout this book. Female falconers who occupy both the position of the dominant handler of the bird and, symbolically, the dominant sex of the bird confound hierarchies based on gender. Even when gender is not addressed explicitly in texts about falconry, the language always accounts for this sex-based hierarchy diametrically opposed to that of its human readers. It is in this linguistic and grammatical subversion that the threads of poetics, critical animal studies, and feminism converge in my study. This book thus argues for a kaleidoscopic view of gender in medieval literature, interrogating medieval misogyny through a poetics of practice, through women’s self-representation as falconers, and through an overturning of a presumedly misogynous trope. 47. Burger, Conduct Becoming, 2. 48. Burger, Conduct Becoming, 2. 49. Crocker, Matter of Virtue, 152. 50. Crocker, Matter of Virtue, 12; 13.

14

Introduction

Attending to both the poetics of comparison and the actual practice of a human–animal relationship does more for critical animal studies than blur boundaries between species. Such a claim places this book in conversation with studies such as Laurie Shannon’s The Accommodated Animal, which “tracks a particular tradition that accommodates the presence of animals and conceives them as actors and stakeholders endowed by their creator with certain subjective interests.”51 Shannon’s book, like mine, is not interested in literature that uses “animal imagery” to signify something about humans only. Such representations place animals under “human rhetorical, poetic, or literary control,” and so Shannon turns to other modes of writing about animals, such as legal, theological, and scientific writings.52 Hawking Women argues that falconry training itself and the writings describing that training undermine control as a social and poetic concept. Literary comparisons between women and hawks did animalize women, but they did so without the effect of degradation, prompting us to reconsider what human–animal comparisons mean in terms of subjugation and reading practice. Falconry problematizes the traditional hierarchical and entirely violent paradigm that we might assume about a human–animal training relationship. Because the initial phase of falconry training requires the falconer to carry, attend, and speak to the hawk for several days and nights in the darkened mews, falconers must sacrifice the human comfort of their own chamber, their own bed, and even control over their own senses, being without candle or sunlight. In his examination of violence against animals in the Middle Ages, Karl Steel offers a concise explanation for one contribution of critical animal studies: “the category ‘human’ is best understood by examining its depen53 dent relation on the category ‘animal.’” Humans “attempt to claim a unique, oppositional identity for themselves,” Steel argues, through “violence against animals.”54 Yet the traditional human–animal violent power structure that Steel traces in his study is not always applicable to the relationship outlined in falconry manuals and evinced in poetry, in which human and raptor occupy an ephemeral space of not-quite-subjugation. My study joins those of Steel and McCracken, who both investigate “representations of human dominion over animals,” but like McCracken’s In the Skin of the Beast, this book disputes the legitimacy of dominion in relationships between humans as well as between humans and animals and even outlines the ways that “shared intimacy with 51. Shannon, Accommodated Animal, 18. 52. Shannon, Accommodated Animal, 6. 53. Steel, How to Make a Human, 4. 54. Steel, How to Make a Human, 15.



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animals redefines human kinship structures.”55 My ecofeminist approach to shared intimacy between woman and hawk interrogates oppositional relationships between species and between genders. Feminist scholars “understand that either/or categories often imply hierarchies that cannot be undone by simply reversing the poles of a given dyad. We have learned to look instead for narrative and cultural formations that rely on the seemingly paradoxical construction of both/and, since women so often occupy a given cultural or rhetorical position and its opposite at the same time.”56 The uncertain control in falconry renders it just such a paradoxical cultural practice, and this book follows that paradox into poetic narrative to examine the influence of gender and species on form. Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd argue for a formalist approach to feminist studies of early modern literature, but their methods apply to premodern study as well. Dodds and Dowd find that “most early feminist scholars on early modern women’s writing turned to historical, cultural, biographical, and other contextual methods rather than to formalism as their primary critical lens. Even in those studies that did consider formal elements, biographical or contextual material related to the author’s status as a woman writer frequently set the terms of analysis.”57 While this contextual approach does inform our understanding of women’s participation in medieval literary culture, we have much to gain from considering the influence of gender on form. Falconry manuals show us that the specific faculties required to train hawks to fly to the glove were so all-consuming that they became rich stores of shared experience from which to create narrative mechanisms, metaphors, and poetic forms. A twenty-first-century reader of Troilus and Criseyde will not read the comparison of Criseyde to a mewed falcon with the same mix of trepidation and pride as the falconer who has cautiously measured bloody tidbits, nervously examined the growing tail feathers for defects indicating muscle frailty, and waited out the molting season with all the anxious anticipation that a good or bad molt might guarantee or negate. This book’s close readings of courtly literature demonstrate how the language of such falconry references, together with falconry concepts from treatises, trained readers to interpret control of a female body like Criseyde’s in romance. Rather than “metaphoriz[ing] women out of existence,” as E. Jane Burns worries of postmodern approaches to medieval texts, the readings in this book attend to the training structures behind falconry comparisons.58 In examining representations of women in adultery 55. McCracken, In the Skin of the Beast, 3. 56. Burns, “Medieval Feminist Movement,” 33. 57. Dodds and Dowd, “Case for a Feminist Return to Form,” 83–84. 58. Burns, Bodytalk, 18.

16

Introduction

narratives, Hawking Women contributes to the efforts of feminist critics like Burns and Roberta Krueger, and more recently Carissa Harris, to identify a resistant voice “speaking from the female body” from within a misogynous framework.59 We have already seen brief falconry metaphors in the opening to this introduction, but full-length poems that feature the direct comparison between woman and bird demonstrate more cogently the convergence of literal and symbolic hawk. Of course, medieval readers would have been imbued in systematic misogyny based on philosophical and theological precepts. But, as the conduct manuals have shown, the distance between written precepts and lived practice allows for flexibility in interpretation. While the content of these poems is not inherently feminist, the falconry metaphors on which they rely do undercut the message of repression, generating a resistant reading. This 60 excerpt from the fifteenth-century ballad “Pluk of her bellys & let here flee” (Pluck off her bells and let her fly) employs the language of falconry training to compare the behavior of a released hawk to that of an unruly female lover: Who carpys of byrddys of grete jentrys The sperhawke me semyth makys moste dysporte And moste acordyng for all degreys For small byrddys sche puttys to morte Y reclaymyd on, as y schall reporte As longe as sche wolde to me a ply When sche wolde noȜt to my gloue resorte 61 Then plukkyd y of here bellys & let here fly [Whoever chatters about birds of great nobility, / the sparrowhawk seems to me to offer the most entertainment / and most suitability for all ranks, / for she puts to death small birds. / As I shall report, I tamed one, / as long as she would submit to me; / when she would not return to my glove, / then I plucked off her bells and let her fly.]

59. Burns, Bodytalk, 18. See also Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender, and Harris, Obscene Pedagogies. 60. This poem appears in a 1450 miscellany of English and Latin prose and verse (Trinity College, Cambridge, MS O.9.38), fol. 21r–22r. A scribal hand differing from that of the poem added the title, “Pluk of her bellys & let here flee,” in the upper margin of folio 21r. The poem is sometimes titled in modern editions after the first line, “Who carpys of byrddys,” but I have elected to use the title given in the manuscript. 61. “Pluk of her bellys & let here flee,” lines 1–8 (hereafter cited in text by line number).



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In falconry terms, plucking off a hawk’s bells meant removing a sonorous tracking device from the bird’s feet, effectively relinquishing control over the bird. The speaker uses coy language early in the poem to hint at the amorous reveal of the explicit comparison to a lover in the third stanza. In the second stanza he feeds his hawk “byrddys of Valentyne” and yet “to another sche dyd enclyne” (12–13). While the first two stanzas only hint at an allegorical interpretation of the poem, the third stanza explicitly aligns the “sperhawke” with “yowre paramours” whose “hert begynnyth to wry” (19, 22). The refrain, “pluk of here bellys and lete here fly,” though apparently meant to warn lovers of sexually deviant women, illustrates how falconry training overturns the concept of controlling women in this poem, and more broadly, in other texts that compare women to hawks. The thirteen-stanza ballad appears to essentialize women’s nature as inherently “changabyll” and “fals” (25, 73), and ultimately beyond the speaker’s control despite any degree of training. Although many of the poem’s lines evoke traditional antifeminist set pieces (among them, echoes of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue),62 each stanza ends on a curious conceit. Falconry training alludes to the submission of bird to human, but the refrain suggests that the answer to untrainability is to relinquish power back to the bird. It is here that the paradox of control in falconry allows a subtle feminism to arise from within the context of a trained bird’s apparent submission. The pairing of “ply” and “fly” in this opening stanza conveys this paradox: in falconry, the falconer must allow the bird to fly, without knowing for certain whether the bird has been “plied” (rendered submissive),63 whether it has been sufficiently “reclaimed” (tamed).64 Plien and reclaimen have amorous meanings, too, which the poem seems to map neatly onto a courtly love narrative. The speaker “reclaymyd” 65 (loved) a sparrowhawk as long as she “wolde ply” (would make her heart submissive to him).66 Yet the conditionality of this statement achieved by the phrase “as longe as” points to the fragility of control in falconry training and in amorous relationships of subjugation. Readers may have laughed at the joke that wavering women have their “bellys” (bells) “plukkyd,” cut loose, as it were. But the poetics of control operative in the practice of falconry causes the antifeminist discourse to unravel. Infidelity narratives that attempt to “plien” women through their representations of “fals” hawks who ultimately fly away 62. The speaker warns that the beloved will turn into a nag of the attire-envying kind, complaining, “Off gay atyrynge y am desolate: / Y se other wymmen go gayer than y” (45–46). 63. Middle English Dictionary Online (hereafter MED), s.v. “Plien” (v.1.2b). 64. MED, s.v. “Reclaimen” (v.1b). 65. MED, s.v. “Reclaimen” (v.2a). 66. MED, s.v. “Plien” (v.1.2a).

18

Introduction

autonomously do more to confound the entire system of subordination than they do to reinforce women’s falsity. By depicting a hawk’s release, they suggest the intractability of interpretation and admit the autonomy of the reader. Sharing folio space with “Pluk of her bellys” in the manuscript is the penitential lyric “Revertere,” which also uses the image of a hawking excursion, and whose internal glossing demonstrates concern for wandering meaning. The poem begins with a youthful speaker who “toke [his] hawke all fore to play” one summer’s day.67 The hawk (alternately named “faucon” and “hawke” throughout the poem)68 flies so far up while pursuing a pheasant that the bird’s scrambling handler must keep his eyes to the sky and promptly stumbles into a briar patch. The briars “bare wrytynge in every leef ”: the Latin word “revertere” (15–16). The falcon’s flight in this poem catalyzes the speaker’s meditation on “revertere,” rendered “to turne a ye” (to turn again) in “englisch tunge,” and he interprets this action as an inward turn to reflect on what his life has been (25–26). That falconry allows this kind of spiritual rumination is not surprising; the bird’s movement between a human arm on earth and the celestial sphere conjures an apt image for such contemplation. But, in addition to a figurative and spiritual “turning again,” “revertere” characterizes the flight movement pursuant to falconry, offering a visual schematic for reading habits. Martha Dana Rust locates a parallel between the description of the falcon’s recursive flight and the trajectory of the reader’s eyes between the heavy glossing and the text of the poem. She argues that the poem’s mise-enpage and content encourage a “switch-backing path of reading and re-reading” that is underpinned by the focus on the falcon’s flight.69 Repeating “revertere” in the final line of each stanza, the poem asks its readers to turn over again their understanding of the text as well as of their own lives. While this poem focuses more on introspection than on gendered control, it nevertheless aligns hawking in youth with “euery synne / dedly other uenyall” (77–78; every sin, deadly or venial). In so doing, the poem turns the narrative action of hawking into a stock symbol common among other moralizing works that use falconry to signify sinful indulgence, especially associated with lust.70 The poem thus wavers between employing falconry as a meditative reading practice and as a 67. Rust, “Revertere!,” line 3. Rust includes a full transcription of the poem on pp. 19–24 of her article. Hereafter, the poem is cited in text by line number, amended for the slight variants from MS O.9.38. 68. That the bird is denoted as “faucon” genders it necessarily as a female bird. While the generic term hawk designates both sexes, faucon or falcon signifies the female of the species. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.vv. “hawk” (n.1.a), “falcon,” (n.1.a). 69. Rust, “Revertere!,” 15, 9. 70. Oggins cites over a hundred instances of falconry “depicted in the context of the deadly sins” among four Bibles moralisées in Kings and Their Hawks, 130.



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symbol for sin. And so, when considered adjacent to and even sharing folio space and scribal hands with “Pluk of her bellys,” “Revertere” also encourages a turning back to the sexual falconry metaphor in the previous ballad, and in anterior representations of falconry. Such a turning back reveals that “Pluk of her bellys” does not follow a straightforwardly antifeminist tradition of viewing women as unruly birds to be tamed. Rather, the late medieval ballad develops from an earlier medieval phenomenon of falconry opening doors otherwise closed to women. Across Europe, women in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries claimed the symbol of a hawking woman on their personal seals, trained and flew hawks and falcons, and wrote and read poetic texts featuring female falconers. This book begins with these earlier examples of falconry in medieval culture to untangle a modern critical myth about the unequivocal misogyny of falconry references in late medieval literature. It traces these literary references to falconry from the rise of the practice’s popularity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through the fifteenth century, when falconry as a literary trope expresses profound fears of women’s sexual sovereignty. Thus, rather than depict how the language of falconry inherently polices female autonomy, Hawking Women argues that late medieval literature demonstrates the opposite: an anxiety that falconry had allowed women too much freedom of both expression and physical movement. Taking our cue from “Revertere,” a literary turning back to a time when falconry had an ambivalent valence will help us understand the production of such a poem as “Pluk of her bellys,” apparently steeped in misogynistic literary tradition. In the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, material and literary culture produce overt and oblique examples of falconry as a model of interpretation for readers. Examining how representations of falconry manifested in the three centuries leading up to “Pluk of her bellys” will help us view it in light of a practice that afforded women the opportunity to choose how they might interpret literary references to birds, thus invalidating the comparison’s misogynistic power. The references in narrative poetry explored in this book are more than isolated moments indicative of the existence of falconry; they are the marked residue of a culture that was steeped in training and controlling, in bending the wild will of the bird. The obliqueness of references to falconry demonstrates its diffusion as a hermeneutic in medieval literary culture.71 That 71. Marrocco notes the same trend in Boccaccio’s oblique references to dance. Distinguished from dance treatises, which do go into detail about dance choreography, Boccaccio’s Il Decamerone, like most fourteenth-century literary writings, he argues, lacks descriptions of contemporary dances because the literary text “assumes that everyone knew how to dance, and that therefore no explanation was needed” (“Music and Dance in Boccaccio’s Time,” 20).

20

Introduction

many texts do not elaborate on falconry references suggests a shared, insider knowledge base for poet and reader. That is, falconry training so permeated courtly culture that even indirect or passing references to it “assume a society familiar with all aspects of falconry” and work from that assumption to create hermeneutic possibilities for the surrounding text.72 At some point, the bird is trained and the pleasure of watching its flight overcomes the anxiety and struggle of training it. But all those who have trained birds themselves or even flown hawks trained for them, that is, the better part of medieval readers, retain memories of the difficulties presented by the initial training phases. This is because at any point, hawks, which never become loyal companions like dogs or horses do, might revert and require re-education or simply desert their falconers, leaving them with only those memories. Hawking Women looks to the literary for the quotidian effect of training and living alongside hawks. In literary texts, falconry references evoke a familiarity with treatises, and in turn intertwine interpretation of an entire work, or even manuscript compilation, with a consciousness of the activity of reading about and practicing falconry. Even when operating from seemingly unimportant references, falconry represents a shared discourse known to the audience, ranging from theories behind the phases of manning the bird, to the value of specific species, to the way a hawk flies, to the specific nature of certain species in a training environment. Falconer and Frederician scholar Nicola de Marco urges us, centuries removed from the practices and priorities of medieval courts, not to underestimate the dominant position of falconry over every other activity in thirteenth-century Frederician life. “The problems of the state, the construction of castles, the studies, the treatises, the poetry and all else, including the harem,” de Marco writes, “came only after, in subordinate position” to making sure that the “falcons were placed in order, their crops full, on their high perches, positioned on either side of 73 the great fireplace where great branches of olive trees burned.” What did it mean to suffer through nights of sleep deprivation alongside a furiously wild and bating hawk and come out the other end of it with a creature extending as almost an appendage of the thinking, rational human? How did the experience of first flying a falcon without its creance feel for a falconer, and how did that memory permeate his or her approach to the rest of the tame world? 72. Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 109. 73. De Marco, “Federico II e la Falconeria,” 205. Translated from the Italian: “I problemi dello stato, la costruzione dei castelli, gli studi, i trattati, la poesia e quant’altro, compreso l’harem, venivano solo dopo, in subordine”; “I suoi falconi non fossero stati ordinatamente disposti, i gozzi pieni, sulle pertiche alte, disposte ai lati del grande camino nel quale bruciavano grandi ceppi d’ulivo.”



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When courtly readers turned from interpreting the posture and plumage of their hawks in the mews to reading romances in their chambers, how did the one experience influence the other? What did that look like for interpretation and production of stories? Training a hawk was an intensely slow process that lasted days, weeks, and even months, creating a siphon from which falconers drew up attitudes and modes of approaching their daily world. There are many examples of falconry references in medieval literature, and studies that enumerate these references are invaluable for our understanding of falconry’s prevalence in a medieval imagination. At the top of this list, Baudouin Van den Abeele’s study gathers and categorizes hundreds of falconry references in medieval French literature.74 Hawking Women’s aims are different. Rather than gathering a comprehensive collection of allusions to falconry, this book is concerned primarily with understanding and depicting a medieval method of engaging with these references. The first two chapters address the control-and-release paradox central to the entire book, beginning with an examination of the theory of control outlined in Frederick’s falconry treatise. The wide diffusion of falconry manuals indicates an audience with a proclivity for and familiarity with falconry. The most lauded and comprehensive medieval hawking manual, the Liber de arte venandi cum avibus, compiled in the mid-thirteenth century by Frederick II, shows how falconry manuals’ written representation of a material practice allowed them to reach beyond falconry qua falconry, participating in a discourse about control of language and about control of reading. After introducing the falconry treatise as a literary genre that focuses on the aesthetics of training and flying the strongest birds—the female of the species—chapter 2 examines the single falconry sonnet in the Canzoniere Vaticano, a collection of one thousand Frederician poems in the vernacular, as evidence of this gendered power inversion. Prior references to female hawks in troubadour poetry use a schema that fits neatly into a patriarchal structure. Yet the sonnet “Tapina in me che amava uno sparvero” (Wretched me, who loved a sparrowhawk), which depicts a female falconer and a female bird / presumed male lover, subverts training metaphors that position dominant male falconer against subjugated female bird/ lover. “Sparvero,” or sparrowhawk, always refers to the female of the species, so the apparent problem of animal knowledge encounters practical difficulty in translation: what pronouns did the birds think in? From there, the chapters follow the phases of falconry training and living alongside these birds. Chapter 3 focuses on capturing the birds from the nest and placing them in an enclosed space. MS Harley 978 contains an Anglo 74. Van den Abeele, La fauconnerie dans les lettres françaises du xiie au xive siècle.

22

Introduction

Norman verse falconry manual fragment immediately preceding Marie de France’s Lais. This fragmented manual outlines training a hawk to tolerate human control in enclosed spaces but terminates before explaining how to hunt with a trained bird. Marie de France’s seventh lai Yonec depicts a lady who is enclosed in a tower and a hawk who transforms into a knight, placing both characters in the structural positions of hawk and handler. Building on a discussion of enclosure from the Harley hawking manual, the chapter argues that falconry references converge and refract the source of power in the narrative. Chapter 4 examines the falconry phase of seeling, or sewing the eyelids shut and hooding the falcon to manipulate its vision and memory retrieval. After contextualizing the fourteenth-century lay Sir Orfeo among other falconry references in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this chapter looks more specifically at Orfeo’s lost wife Heurodis as a hawking woman to demonstrate how characters perform a process akin to seeling on one another. The chapter posits that seeling within the narrative makes possible a seeling in the reading process: reading Heurodis as a falconer allows readers to understand the lay as a revision of its classical source, illuminating the double loss of Eurydice, rather than of Orpheus alone. Chapter 5 discusses mewing, or waiting out the molting period and monitoring the regeneration of new flight feathers. This chapter traces the literary history of a short metaphoric phrase comparing women to falcons coming out of the “mews” after molting their feathers. It argues that the intergeneric movement and contradictory structure of this metaphor allow a reassessment of its misogynous impact, shedding new light on female mutability in Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès, the fabliau Guillaume au faucon, Guillaume de Machaut’s Le dit de l’alerion, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. While these chapters group texts by the particular phase of falconry they exemplify, it is central to my argument that the entire training process is at work even when not specifically mentioned in a text. Therefore, as chapters advance from one phase to another in falconry training, they also loop back to build on readings and falconry manuals treated in earlier chapters. By the final chapter, then, it will be clear how a single falconry reference imbricates the entire training process in its narrative and for its reader. The conclusion returns to the conduct book, Le Ménagier de Paris, to discuss healing or assessing the health of the hawk as a reparative reading practice. Reading the Squire’s Tale alongside the conduct book recasts Chaucer’s romance heroine Canacee as a hawking woman privileging accommodation over subordination, metonymy over metaphor. In turn, the apparent antifeminist tradition seen in “Pluk of her bellys” crumbles under the instability of the metaphoric correspondence between subjugated subject, avian and human.



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I began Hawking Women trying to understand the power dynamics of a gendered metaphor comparing training hawks to training women into submission. Turning to the material practice behind this metaphor revealed not just explanatory footnotes for the esoteric terms but an intersection of aesthetics, training, and gender. Female falconers with female hawks sidestep the human hierarchy in which women occupy a subordinate position. These hawking women gain momentary and metonymic access to the hierarchy of their avian companions, in which female has always been the default, has always been “on top.”75 Given the present mass extinction of birds and mass discrimination against women, these medieval interspecies hermeneutic models contain lessons for us about how women resisted within a culture of training. This resistance takes the form of a feminist poetics, a metonymic alliance between subordinate subject and dominant object in that space between control and release.

75. Johnson, “Women on Top,” 299. Johnson’s theory on fabliau women’s cunning subversion of power complements the figure of the female falconer and is explored in chapter 5.

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

Falconry training is defined by contradictions. Perhaps this is the reason that although falconry was a widespread practice by the High Middle Ages, writings about how to do it lacked both practical and theoretical guidance, opting instead to describe diagnoses and cures for avian maladies. But one treatise self-consciously constructed for posterity does detail the specifics of training birds of prey, and to do so, it reframes the practice as an ars, “in the sense 1 of a perfect synthesis of theoretical knowledge and practical skills.” In the mid-thirteenth century, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen achieved this synthesis through a series of rigorous measures resulting in his life’s work, the Liber de arte venandi cum avibus (Book on the Art of Hunting with Birds), which exists today in twelve manuscripts, eight in Latin and four in Old French, copied between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries throughout Europe. Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor known as Stupor Mundi (Wonder of the World), is famous for his multiple excommunications, sometimes tied to his fascination with Arabic culture, a product of his Sicilian upbringing. He is also known for his scientific and philosophical experiments, his patronage of vernacular poetry, and his founding of the University of Naples, the 1. Budriesi, “Introduction,” xv. Translated from the Italian: “nel senso di perfetta sintesi di consocenza teoriche e di abilità pratiche.”

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first pointedly secular university in Europe.2 But his most beloved pursuit was falconry, and the product of this obsession was a detailed treatise with over nine hundred illustrations of flying creatures, human trainers, and training equipment and structures. He scrutinized and sometimes disproved previous Aristotelian writings on birds; he collected decades of written observations from his own experiences observing prey birds and training predatory birds; and he solicited the personal experiences of master falconers from England to Egypt.3 Frederick’s text addresses and remedies the inadequacy of previous written attempts to explain falconry, which he remarks were “inartificialiter tradite” (2.16; artlessly delivered),4 by arguing that while falconry is a practice requiring experiential instruction, it is also an ars worthy of its own treatise.5 My reading of De arte venandi cum avibus suggests that the contradictions themselves are what make falconry training worthy of theorizing in text. After dismissing the simpler training of four-legged hunting animals who “terram ambulent” (12.12; tread the earth) and therefore “plus possunt subici potestati hominum quam aves” (12.11; can be more subjected to the power of humans than [can] birds), Frederick’s prose tethers human ingenuity to the nearly uncontrollable flight of a falcon in the first of a series of beautiful contradictions: Aves vero, cum per aerem volent, non possunt capi vi, set solo ingenio hominum et capi possunt et doceri. Propter hoc hec ars venandi difficilior est ceteris venationibus et dignior. Amplius omnes aves rapaces possunt doceri per hanc artem capere maiores aves [.  .  .] quam per se caperent [.  .  .] non solum eo modo, quo caperent per se, set pluribus aliis modis, per quod probatur etiam artis difficultas et utilitas. Amplius aves rapaces et faciem hominis et conversari cum homine naturaliter abhorrent, set per hanc artem docentur facere ad opus hominum, quod operabantur per se et ad opus suum, et conversari cum homine, quem naturaliter fugiebant. (12.12–26) [Yet birds, since they fly through the air, cannot be captured by force, but only by human ingenuity can they be captured and trained. For this rea 2. For more on Frederick’s scientific curiosity, see Brewer, Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages, 184–87. 3. Wood and Fyfe, “Translator’s Introduction,” xlix. 4. Citations to the Budriesi edition of Frederick II, De arte venandi cum avibus, occur parenthetically in text by page and line number. Translations are my own. Lewis and Short gloss the word “inartificialis” as “inartificial; not according to the rules of art” (916). 5. See Haskins, “‘De Arte Venandi cum Avibus’ of the Emperor Frederick II,” 347, for a brief survey on existing works on falconry during Frederick’s time.

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son, this hunting art is more complex and nobler than the others. Further, through this art all birds of prey can be trained to capture larger birds [. . .] than those that they would capture for themselves [. . .] and not only in the way they would capture them on their own, but in many other ways, and this proves the complexity and function of this art. And further: birds of prey naturally abhor human presence and keeping company with humans, but through this art they are trained to perform for humans that which they would do for themselves, and to keep company with humans, whom they had naturally avoided.]

This chapter attends to these contradictions, not through an ornithological lens but through an aesthetic one, to argue that falconry training interacts with medieval poetics and contributes to medieval reading practice precisely 6 because of the set of contradictions that compose it. Hawks are never domesticated, but training requires that they keep constant company with humans. Hawks are blinded during training, but their greatest hunting asset is their eyes. Hawks are natural predators but need to be trained to capture prey they wouldn’t naturally pursue. Hawks need to be tethered in training but released for the hunt with no guarantee they’ll return. Sexual dimorphism in hawks contradicts that in humans: hawks “habent [. . .] feminam maiorem masculo” (24.27–31; have larger females than males). The female is larger, stronger, and dominant, a fact so significant and pervasive that it undergirds all writings and conversations about hawks but nevertheless translates to inferiority in medieval anthropomorphic metaphor. A controlling human subject training a dominant avian object creates another contradiction, only implied but never admitted by Frederick: falconers believe they are training their birds but are actually the ones being trained. Frederick’s treatise uniquely establishes a connection between didactic writing, the practice of training, and aesthetic display. Later treatises, such as Guillaume de Machaut’s fourteenth-century allegorical poem-cum-treatise, Dit de l’alerion (The Tale of the Alerion), explicitly discuss falconry in gendered anthropomorphic terms, instructing male lovers to pursue women in the same way that a falconer would pursue the most trainable hawk. The diffusion of this metaphor from the Middle Ages through the end of the early modern period makes it is easy to see why modern readers might imagine that 6. Scientific and ornithological readings of the text have held precedent in the past (see Haffer, “Development of Ornithology in Central Europe”), though the richness of the illustrations has led to recent discoveries in the history of medieval trade routes (see Dalton, Salo, Niemelä, and Örmä, “Frederick II of Hohenstaufen’s Australasian Cockatoo”).

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this gendered comparison inheres in all discourses on falconry.7 As a result, literary scholars citing Frederick’s treatise to contextualize falconry references in medieval narratives perceive a gendered metaphorical meaning a priori, which is hardly blameworthy; iconography and sexual figurative language in other genres substituting falcons for female body parts do seem to suggest that all writings about falconry are always already indexing human sexuality and misogyny.8 But Frederick draws from Arab traditions of falconry training and reverence for the aesthetics of falconry, and his treatise is not interested in human women or men at all, except as artists creating beautiful flights with trained birds. Hence, by jumping to a gendered subtext in Frederick’s text, we risk reducing the aesthetics of the treatise; by reading only for anthropomorphic metaphor, we miss the value of the interspecies training described. Another problem for anglophone literary critics is the only available English translation’s usage of singular female pronouns rather than the neutral or plural pronouns found in the Latin or in translations into modern Romance languages. Casey A. Wood and Marjorie Fyfe’s 1943 English translation of Frederick’s treatise uses plural pronouns or simply repeats the subject of the sentence without gendering it as much as is possible, but it fairly often elects to use the female pronoun when translation requires a pronoun because “the falcon is generally assumed to be the female bird, and as such is referred to as ‘she’ or ‘her.’”9 These translators follow the convention of their twentiethcentury contemporaries in writings about falconry in their general assumption about the sex of the bird. This 1948 introduction to Falcons and Falconry, by Frank Illingworth, for example, uses the female pronoun (combined with post–World War II aeronautic imagery) to describe the anatomy of a typical falcon—the default is not “it/its” or “he/him/his” but simply, and without explanation, “she/her/hers”: “Her body is designed for aerobatics and speed. 10 She is both dive-bomber and fighter with thunder in her talons.” Because Illingworth is writing to an audience of falconers who understand the dominance of the female in the species, the pronoun choice does not suggest an implicit subordination of “her” based on sex. But to the non-falconers reading English translations of medieval texts, Wood and Fyfe’s pronoun choice is problematic. Supplying the pronoun she where Latin requires none and trans 7. Readers may recall most readily Shakespeare’s use of the metaphor in The Taming of the Shrew. Petruchio speaks of taming Kate according to falconry precepts: “And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged, / For then she never looks upon the lure. [. . .] She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat: / last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not” (4.2.172–78). 8. Chapter 5 treats sexual iconography and the fabliau pun faucon / false cunt at length. 9. Wood and Fyfe, Art of Falconry, 613. 10. Illingworth, Falcons and Falconry, 19.

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lating the neutral pronoun se as “her” and “herself,” the Wood and Fyfe translation associates falconry birds with the secondary status ascribed to human females and creates the perception of a hierarchical subtext based on human gender discrimination. The default of the female sex in raptors and its impact on language is a subject I return to at the end of this chapter and in the next chapter. For now, attending to the choice of gendered pronouns in the English translation illustrates how this most important treatise has been used in the service of proving an expected argument in examining medieval culture: that male dominates female just as man dominates beast and fowl. For example, Frederick explains that it is useful to hold the jesses, attached to the feet of the bird, because “per eos retinetur falco, ne recedat preter voluntatem tenentis” (322.19–20; the falcon is held back by them, nor does it fly off except by will of the handler). In this case, Wood and Fyfe supply the pronominal adjective her, unnecessarily gendering the bird: “the falcon is prevented from flying off without the consent of her bearer.”11 This kind of translation has been used by scholars to prove how subjugation translates from the falconry world to the human world. For example, R. Shoaf turns to the Wood and Fyfe translation of Frederick’s treatise to explain sexual pursuit in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. He identifies in the opening passage from Frederick’s treatise a “lyricism about the pursuit of falcons” but suggests that the lyricism only veils an anthropomorphic “suggestiveness”: “The passages [“from the introductory chapter to the most famous treatise on falconry of the Middle Ages”] could as well be written of Troilus’s and Pandarus’s pursuit of Criseyde as of some prince’s pursuit of a peregrine falcon.”12 Words like “captured” and “trained” from Fred13 erick’s introduction prompt in modern readers an “implied comparison” to manuals like Andreas Capellanus’s De arte honeste amandi (The Art of Courtly Love). Sara Gutmann, too, reads a human gendered subtext in Frederick’s treatise, identifying a “language similar to misogynistic marriage rhetoric”14 in its description of training falcons to “adquirant in se proprietates et mores artificiales standi cum homine et revertendi ad ipsum. Qui mores adquisiti per duritiam processu temporis et assiduitate vertantur eis in habitum et consuetudinem et naturam alteram” (358.14–17; acquire habits and artificial ways of life [consisting of] being with humans and returning to them. With the passing of time, these habits, painstakingly instilled thanks to a rigorous and constant training, are changed by them into a way of being, custom, and 11. Wood and Fyfe, Art of Falconry, 139. 12. Shoaf, “Troilus and Criseyde,” 150. 13. Shoaf, “Troilus and Criseyde,” 150. 14. Gutmann, “Chaucer’s Chicks,” 71.

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second nature). The English edition to which both Shoaf and Gutmann refer translates this passage quite differently, removing agency from the bird and reducing the emphasis on training as a shared experience: “She must learn to live with man and return to him promptly. Such virtues acquired by training, through patience and passage of time, eventually become habitual and, as it were, second nature.”15 While the Wood and Fyfe edition is helpful for its framing materials and accessibility, it is important to undo some of its reductive treatment of the original Latin’s nuance. This “implied comparison” between training women and training falcons is true of texts in the tradition of Machaut’s allegory, discussed in later chapters.16 But a human gendered comparison is not already there in Frederick’s Latin text, and this distinction is important for understanding how the poetics of control in falconry enables an interspecies feminism in concurrent and later poetic texts. In fact, the passage quoted previously demonstrates how falconry demands a change of condition (“habitus”) and custom (“consuetudo”) of not just the bird but also the human handler, who must patiently bear the rigor (“duritia”), constant presence (“assiduitas”), and time (“tempus”) required of the training (“processus”), which Frederick warns explicitly “tedeant falconarium” (566.32; will be wearying for the falconer). Gendered anthropomorphic assumptions of Frederick’s treatise reduce its aesthetic scope and preclude feminist readings that arise from what is present in De arte venandi cum avibus: a submission of the human handler to the training of a dominant female bird. Concentrating on the language of and cultural conditions surrounding Frederick’s treatise redresses previous treatment of this medieval source material and lays the foundation for an argument that informs the rest of this book: the structure of thought behind training these birds operates even when the birds are not present. This chapter explores Frederick’s treatise at length, before misogynous comparisons between training falcons and domesticating women become commonplace in other literary texts, to show how the aesthetic goal of the treatise enables altered approaches to form and to narrative mechanisms in those texts. The contradictions of training create more multivalenced readings than the straightforward conquest of a female body, human or avian. Anna Laura Trombetti Budriesi, who transcribed and translated the 144 folios of De arte venandi cum avibus into over a thousand pages of a Latin-Italian scholarly edition, expresses at the conclusion of her meticulous introduction: “Frederick II considered falconry, above being a noble hobby, 15. Wood and Fyfe, Art of Falconry, 152. 16. Shoaf, “Troilus and Criseyde,” 150.

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an intellectual exercise.”17 I propose that thinking through falconry training engages that intellectual exercise, lending form and structure to medieval literary texts.

HAWKING VERSUS HUNTING Frederick makes the argument that falconry “ars est, et ceteris venationibus nobilior et dignior, et ideo prior” (14.12–13; is an art, and nobler and more worthy than other venery, and therefore primary [in importance]). Falconry treatises often appeared separate from general hunting manuals for one simple reason: hunting with hawks required its own method. For example, Gaston Phoebus’s Livre de chasse (Book of the Hunt; 1387) and William Twiti’s L’Art de venerie (The Art of Venery; ca. 1328) both intend hunting with hounds when they refer to the chase, game, venery, and hunting in general. These manuals, as well as texts such as Henri de Ferrières’s Livre du roi Modus et de la reine Ratio (The Book of King Method and Queen Theory; ca. 1354–76) and Gace de la Buigne’s Le Roman des Deduis (The Tale of Deduction; before 1377) that stage moralizing debates between falconers and hunters, appear in the 18 century after Frederick’s treatise. During the thirteenth century, Frederick’s name appears as a hunting authority in the earliest European hunting manual, De arte bersandi (On the Art of Deer Hunting; attributed to “Guicennas” and dated to the mid-thirteenth century),19 but falconry treatises took precedence over venery in didactic writings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.20 Hawks, like other animals in precapitalist society, “were with man at the centre of his world,” and this sustained proximity with animals inflected 21 human thought in myriad ways. But hawks were influential in a different way from companion or work animals because, unlike these domesticated animals, wild birds of prey required constant contact with their handlers to overcome their natural fear of humans, as illustrated in the opening passage from 17. Budriesi, “Introduction,” cii. Translated from the Italian: “Federico II considera la caccia, prima che un nobile svago, un esercizio intelletuale.” 18. Smets and Van den Abeele, “Medieval Hunting,” 68. 19. The only clue to the author of this treatise inextricably links him to Frederician authority: “Frederick’s reputation as a hunter, if not his personal inspiration to authorship, may also be seen in the little treatise on hunting of a certain Guicennas, ‘master in every kind of hunting by the testimony of the hunters of Lord Frederick, emperor of the Romans’” (Haskins, “Science at the Court of Emperor Frederick II,” 681). For more on this treatise’s authorship and stemma, see Tilander, “De arte bersandi, le plus ancien traité cynégétique de l’Occident.” 20. Stuhmiller, Handbook of Medieval Culture, 706. 21. Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” 3.

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Frederick’s treatise. In contrast, contemporary Frederician and later writings about hunting with dogs utilize something useless to falconers, something that determines the relationship between dominant human handler and domesticated canine companion: physical affection and good cheer. The earliest Latin hunting treatise, De arte bersandi, concludes its scant three folios with a description of this facile relationship between the hound and hunter after the pursuit of deer: “frica caput leviter cum manu et mostra ei bonam voluntatem, et istud est quare brachetus multum se letificat” (pet them lightly on the head with your hand and show them good will, and through these means the brachets [hunting dogs] are greatly cheered).22 The tactile and psychological relationship between hound and handler is already established by virtue of canine companionate history alongside humans. This is not to say that proximity to hunting dogs does not produce altered ways of approaching the world 23 or understanding human identity. It is precisely the similarity of dogs to humans, Jamie C. Fumo argues, that qualifies them to “fram[e] and delimi[t] the medieval self.”24 In complete opposition to birds of prey, which, Frederick argues, “naturaliter magis absistunt ab hominibus [. . .] quam quadrupedia” (10.25–27; naturally flee from humans [. . .] more than quadrupeds [i.e., 25 dogs]), dogs “are social animals.” Medieval philosophers and hunters alike understood that hounds were agreeable and malleable precisely because they already “loueþ company of men and mowe nouȝt be wiþouten men” (love men’s company and might not be without men) from the moment of their birth in domestication.26 The social aspect of hunting with dogs extends to human participants as well. While “the pursuit of [deer] occurs thanks to the collaboration of all the hunters” and their hounds, falconry “emphasizes the prowess of the individual” falconer and individual bird.27 The sheer number of treatises explaining how to simply care for hawks demonstrates their alien nature in comparison to hounds. Of the forty-seven French vernacular hunting texts, thirty-three discuss falconry exclusively, and only seven discuss 28 hunting with hounds exclusively. 22. Haskins, Studies in Mediaeval Culture, 118. My translation. 23. See, for example, Langdon’s ethological reading, “The Nose Knows.” 24. Fumo, “Medieval Dog Whisperers,” 225. 25. Fumo, “Medieval Dog Whisperers,” 222. 26. Fumo, “Medieval Dog Whisperers,” 222. Fumo cites John Trevisa’s Middle English translation of Barthlomaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus rerum. 27. Budriesi, “Introduction,” xx. Translated from the Italian: “l’inseguimento della preda avviene grazie alla collaborazione di tutti i cacciatori”; “pone l’accento sulla prodezza del singolo cavaliere.” 28. Smets and Van den Abeele, “Medieval Hunting,” 69.

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In hunting treatises, a presupposition of canine domestication precludes the need for a theoretical apparatus to access the hunting skills of the animal. In fact, most folios in hunting manuals are dedicated to explaining the behavior of the wild prey rather than that of the hunting dogs themselves. Hunters can rely on their hounds’ pack mentality and instinctive loyalty to humans to orchestrate a chase, where the unknown—the variable—is the behavior of the prey, not the canine hunting companion, who is as predictable and constant as a human subject. Gaston Phoebus’s Livre de chasse lists the qualities of hounds, which culminate in the suggestion that a good hound is akin to a good man: Chien est loyal à son seinheur et de bonne amour et de vraye. Chien est de bon entendement et a grant connoissance et grant judgement; chien a force et bonté; chien a sagesse et est beste véritable; chien a grant mémoire; chien a grant sentiment; chien a grant diligence et grant puissance; chien a grant vaillance et grant subtillité; chien a grant légéreté et grant apercevance; chien est bien à commandement, quar il apprendra comme un homme tout quant 29 que on li enseinhera. [A hound is loyal to its lord and of good and true love. A hound has good understanding and has great knowledge and great judgment; a hound has strength and goodness; a hound has wisdom and is a reliable beast; a hound has good memory; a hound has innate physical and emotional insight; a hound has great diligence and great power; a hound has great valor and great subtlety; a hound has great lightness and great perception; a hound is good at orders, for it will learn like a man all that one teaches it.]

Hounds, Phoebus argues, possess qualities that human society understands and champions, and he even suggests that teaching a dog is like teaching a man. This manner of training requires a human to imagine what would be pleasing or displeasing to another human, such as reward for good behavior and punishment for bad behavior: On les puet bien aidier à fere bons et bien les enseinher et duire en les bien chevauchier et accompaihner, en fesant plaisirs et bonnes cuyrées, quant ils ont bien fet, et en blasmant et en batant quant ils font mal; car ils sont bestes, 30 si les convient monstrer de fet ce que on vuelt qu’ilz fassent. 29. Phoebus, La Chasse, 84. My emphasis and translation. 30. Phoebus, La Chasse, 106.

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[They can be helped to be good by teaching them well, and leading them well by horseback and accompanying them, by granting desires and good curées (meat rewards) when they have behaved well, and scolding and beating them when they behave badly; for they are beasts, and they need to be taught to do that which we want them to do.]

And like humans, dogs understand hierarchy and subordination. Their most humanlike quality may just be that they understand their place in relation to a superior. Hawks are always considered wild, and Old World hawks are not pack animals, and therefore do not operate according to hierarchy.31 Hawks are their own superiors, human interlopers merely a means to a richer caloric meal. Like all predators, hawks operate on a system of minimal caloric output for maximum caloric input. In the wild, hawks would not pursue large prey unless they were starving. Wild hawks weigh risk against benefit and therefore normally hunt mice, small birds, and lizards, prey that offers small caloric benefit but presents little risk to their talons and wings. The master falconers with whom I apprenticed in Marysville, California, claim that the falconer is the “hunting partner” because she assists the hawk in safely catching larger game than it could catch in the wild, decreasing risk and increasing reward. The human companion protects the hawk from the retaliation of larger prey, dispatching the captured prey quickly before it can damage the limbs or talons of her hawk while in its grip. Whereas hounds may be rewarded with treats or food from the hunt and pats of affection, a hawk is rewarded with food only, food it would be unlikely to savor in the wild: the heart and liver of the larger, dangerous prey. Training falcons required constant human proximity, creating a familiarity with the habits of the bird and “a society familiar with all aspects of falconry.”32 Yet, perhaps because of this familiarity, most falconry treatises do not address all or even the most important aspects of training hawks to cohabit with humans. Frederick’s dissatisfaction with anterior treatises on falconry, includ 31. Frederick discusses certain species that can be trained to hunt in a cast (or group) to take down large prey, but the hawks available to him and the rest of Europe and the Mediterranean were not by nature social animals. The Harris’s Hawk, native to the New World, hunts in a pack led by an alpha female in the wild, but these birds were only introduced as falconry birds in the 1960s. In fact, Harris’s hawks’ introduction into falconry altered the practice completely, allowing for an increase in hawking-tourism, even in Europe, where they are now imported from the Americas: “[Harris’s hawks’] group behavior—which incorporates not only co-operation but also levels of dominance—makes them naturally predisposed to domestication and co-operative hunting with a human partner in exactly the same way as dogs” (Hall, Falconry Basics, 25). 32. Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 109.

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ing the section on falcons and hawks from Aristotle’s De animalibus, emerges primarily from their lack of experimentation. In his prologue Frederick invokes and questions Aristotelian authority, claiming to follow (“secuti” [4.1]) what Aristotle had written, and then quickly accusing the “principem philosophorum” (4.3–4; prince of philosophers) of not witnessing what he writes: “raro namque aut nunquam venationes avium exercuit” (4.4–5; for in fact, he seldom or never practiced hunting birds). In other words, he accuses Aristotle of not actually training birds before writing about birds of prey, implying that Frederick’s own training experience positioned him to emend his predecessor’s writings. Grounded on the principle that a budding apprentice must learn the technicalities of the practice from observing a master falconer, most falconry treatises forgo details about how to train the birds, reserving their advice for recognizing and curing avian maladies. Adelard of Bath’s twelfth-century Questiones naturales includes a falconry treatise, De avibus tractatus (Treatise on Birds), that shares the dialogic form of the other components in the tripartite Questiones.33 While the shared dialogic form creates an explicit link between dialectics and falconry, Adelard’s falconry treatise hardly describes the training in any detail: “Illud autem cave, ne antequam privatus fuerit ad manum aptes nec clames. Prius enim oportet privatum esse quam aptatum. Si enim properaveris, malum aliquem motum addiscet. Id quoque cave, ut firmiter ante aptatus sit quam eum volare facias.” (246; But beware that it is not called to the hand before it is trained and manned. For it must be manned before it is trained. For if you hurry, it will learn some bad behaviors. Beware also that it is firmly trained before you let it fly.)34 Adelard urges his nephew to beware of (“cave”) the training without describing exactly how to train the bird, here or elsewhere in his treatise. Yet Adelard’s treatise creates a template for later authors to complete with descriptions of training—a feat Adelard approaches without fully describing on several occasions, confessing “quod melius videndo quam legendo disces” (244–45; you will learn this better by seeing than by reading). The point that one must learn falconry from experience as well as from reading might seem obvious enough, but the omission of actual training pro 33. Adelard specifically refers to “accipitrum” (accipiter hawks) in his dialogue, which is why I refer to it as a “hawking” treatise rather than a falconry treatise. Adelard and Frederick specify accipiters and falcons, respectively, in each treatise. Frederick intended to compose a separate treatise on hunting with accipiters specifically, but this treatise is not extant. 34. Citations to Burnett’s edition of Adelard of Bath, Adelard of Bath, Conversations with His Nephew, occur parenthetically in text by page number. My translations have followed Burnett’s for the most part, but I have deviated in selecting the neuter pronouns to better reflect the original Latin.

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cedures here is significant for falconry’s purpose and categorization. While Adelard calls the practice of falconry a negotium or studium, nowhere does he name falconry an ars. Hugh of St. Victor’s twelfth-century study of the arts, the Didascalicon (ca. 1130), likewise categorizes falconry among the mechanical branch of knowledge, specifically in the fifth branch of hunting, in the subcategory “gaming.” Hunting with hawks rounds out a long list that details how “ferina multis modis exercetur”35 (gaming is done in many ways):36 “retibus, pedicis, laqueis, praecipitiis, arcu, jaculis, cuspide, indagine, pennarum odore, canibus, accipitribus”37 (with nets, foot-traps, snares, pits, the bow, javelins, the spear, encircling the game, or smoking it out, or pursuing it with dogs or hawks).38 Like his contemporaries, Hugh draws from the categories established by Plato and Aristotle, but one reason for the ultimate position of hawks on the list is that falconry was not practiced in the West until late antiquity (and so, to answer Frederick’s accusation of Aristotle: he assuredly never trained hawks).39 Frederick’s treatise seeks to re-examine falconry’s place among the arts. Distinguishing “ars” from “artes mechanicae,” Carl A. Willemsen clarifies Frederick’s use of this term in the context of the De arte venandi cum avibus’s ultimate goal: “What the emperor wanted to achieve with his treatise was to liberate [falconry] from a dependent position and low grade [one concomitant with hunting as the fifth of the less ‘theoretical’ and more ‘pragmatic’ artes mechanicae] and to elevate it to the dignity of an independent ‘art’ wor40 thy of the name.” Douglas Kelly writes of the divide between “the examples and instruction” in the genre of composition instruction: “Instruction de arts/ extrinsecus and ex arte/intrinsecus distinguishes between the art as a science or branch of knowledge and practice of it as a technique,” which only come 41 together “in the treatises written in verse and in student compositions.” In 35. Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, Book II, Chapter XXVI, 761. 36. Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, trans. Taylor, 77. 37. Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, Book II, Chapter XXVI, 761. 38. Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, trans. Taylor, 77. 39. While Aristotle does refer to using wild hawks to frighten little birds into hunters’ capture, this story “struck most ancient writers as something fantastic” and as not part of a systematic training process. Epstein insists that in “the literary sources of antiquity [.  .  .] we do not find any reference to falconry in the narrow sense of the term.” He identifies “the first actual reference to hawking in [antiquity] [. . .] in the Eucharisticos, composed, ca. 459 AD, by Paulinus of Pella” (“Origin and Earliest History of Falconry”; 501; 504; 505). 40. Willemsen, “Federico II come scienziato e cacciatore,” 28. Translated from the Italian: “Liberarla da questa posizione di dipendenza e da un gradino così basso, elevarla alla dignità di un ‘ars’ indipendente che meritasse di essere chiamata tale, questo era quel che l’imperatore voleva raggiungere con il suo trattato.” 41. Kelly, Arts of Poetry and Prose, 59.

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his unique approach to his treatise, Frederick shares a formal objective with Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s verse treatise Poetria Nova: it both instructs and enacts, it is both preceptive and creative. Poetria Nova “is a rhetorical treatise in the scope and level of its instruction,” but “at the same time it is a poetic masterpiece that teaches the art by fully embodying its contents.”42 Rather than leaving readers to their own interpretational practice, both Geoffrey and Frederick seek to control representation of art by enacting it within their treatise. While it may be easier to see how a poetry treatise does this, by for example amplifying the length of the section defining amplification and abbreviating the length of the section defining abbreviation,43 Frederick’s method of aestheticizing falconry instruction is more opaque. In expressing what had been inexpressible, Frederick’s treatise challenges the separateness between practical language and aesthetic outcomes. Frederick’s categorization of falconry as an ars in his De arte venandi cum avibus places falconry within the seven liberal arts, and his detailed descriptions of training procedures as a means to an aesthetic end enable a new perception of the practice. Aesthetic concerns emerge on the very first folio of Frederick’s work: “Intentio vero Nostra est manifestare in hoc libro de venatione avium ea, que sunt, sicut sunt, et ad artis certitudinem redigere, quorum nullus scientiam habuit hactenus neque artem.” (4.30–32; Our intention is to show in this book about hunting with birds the things that are there, as they are, and to bring them to the certainty of an art; no one, until now, possessed knowledge or art with regard to them.) By “artem,” Willemsen argues, Frederick intends the artes liberales, which “presuppose theoretical ability” and as such “enjoy a much higher consideration than the [artes mechanicae].”44 Rather than instruct the reader to gain experience through practice only, he tethers “scientiam” to “artem” and theory to practice, thereby articulating what had formerly been inaccessible to readers. The very process of rendering in language this inexpressible knowledge is reflected in the principles of control and aesthetics that compose falconry. Hunting denotes a telos, with winners and losers and an endgame, whereas art, like that of the Sicilian School of poetry that grew out of Frederick II’s court, allows practitioners to experiment with form unencumbered by concern for practical outcomes. The necessary release into the sky of the trained falcon in flight distinguishes it from other types of venery, such as hunting 42. Camargo, “From Liber versuum to Poetria nova,” 1. 43. Camargo, “Introduction,” 13. 44. Willemsen, “Federico II come scienziato e cacciatore,” 28. Translated from the Italian: “Presupponendo capacità teoretiche, le prime [artes liberales] godevano di una ben piu’ alta considerazione delle seconde [artes mechanicae].”

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with weapons or hunting with dogs, making “hec ars venandi difficilior [. . .] ceteris venationibus et dignior” (12.14–15; this hunting art [. . .] more complex and nobler than the others). Such other artes mechanicae “held importance for earning one’s bread and for a working life.”45 But the point of flying a falcon is not to bring home dinner. It is instead to marvel at and control—or perhaps marvel at the possibility of controlling—the motions and outcomes of the falcon’s flight: a stupendous mount, a nearly imperceptible pitch, a dizzying stoop, and a return to the fist. The art lies in training birds “facere ad opus hominum, quod operabantur per se et ad opus suum, et conversari cum homine, quem naturaliter fugiebant” (12.23–26; to perform for humans that which they would do for themselves, and to keep company with humans, whom they had naturally avoided). The relationship on display is not that between predator and prey but that between predator and falconer. Killing, when it even occurs, is secondary to the twofold aesthetic pleasure of watching the falcon fly and having controlled its flight and descent.

AESTHETICS OF FALCONRY Frederick aimed to set his work apart from previous treatises by describing the aesthetic pleasure inherent in watching a falcon fly and in anatomizing that flight, as opposed to the practical utility inherent in using a falcon to catch game. The resources required to train a wild raptor to hunt and return to its handler exceeded the possible monetary gain of game that the birds often did not even catch.46 In this respect, the “ideal of the sport was not essentially a practical one”; rather, the ideal was for falconry to revel in its 47 own excessiveness and “become an integral part of courtly life.” And it did so at the expense of non-aristocratic classes, repossessing vast tracts of land and imposing fines or corporal punishments on those who violated strict hunting laws.48 It is tempting to interpret such a practice as only a marker of status, and treatise manuscripts as merely complicit in this creation of cultural capital. But in so doing we miss an opportunity to understand how the writing within the treatises conveys medieval ideas about controlling aesthetic objects more broadly.

45. Willemsen, “Federico II come scienziato e cacciatore,” 28. Translated from the Italian: “[artes mechanicae] avevano importanza per guadagnare il pane e per la vita professionale.” 46. Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 110–11; Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 40–41. 47. Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 110–11. 48. Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 109–17.

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The treatise’s superlative language in the instruction on flying at prey prioritizes the aesthetic quality of the flight over the material gains of the hunt. Falconers training gyrfalcons, for example, are encouraged to cast them at cranes rather than at other birds because “volantium vero alte ad grues volantes volatus laudabilior est ceteris [. . .] et fortius percutiunt, et postquam percusserint, alte exurgunt. Talis igitur volatus pulcrior” (788.21–25; indeed, the flight of those flying at high flying cranes is more laudable than the rest [. . .] and they strike harder, and after they have struck, they rise up high, so the flight is more beautiful). Frederick’s own prose takes on a poetic quality that cannot be captured in translation; in its crescendo of “v” and “p” sounds, these lines reflect the mounting beauty of flight in their own beautiful artifice. Through alliterating lines and arresting description, this kind of beauty demands attention to form—it is not a beauty created by a divine or natural order. The falconer intervenes in natural processes to author this beauty, in letters and breath, feathers and air. Rather than suggest a divine artifex in God, Frederick’s treatise authorizes human intervention in the creation of beauty and of art. Following Andreas Speer’s call for a “careful reconstruction of how medieval figures [like Thomas Aquinas] experienced art, and what expression they have given to these experiences,” Frederick’s treatise contributes to our understanding of how medieval art and aesthetics intersect in the mid-thirteenth century.49 If falconry is an intellectual exercise that produces “pulchrum” (beauty), we might say that Aquinas’s “intellectual desire finds rest” in this kind of beauty.50 The illustration to one important French copy of Frederick’s treatise makes visible the implicit connection between aesthetics and falconry. The manuscript, BnF MS Fr 12400, was illustrated by Simon d’Orléans and begins with a visual commentary on experiential and theoretical knowledge.51 The bottom margin of folio 1r hosts an entire production line along its unfurling flourish: a sitting monk, working scribe, standing falconer, wrestling rabbit and child, physicking ape, and large falcon (fig. 1.1). In this illustration, the monk and falconer mirror one another in posture and possessions: the falcon perches on the falconer just as the book perches on the monk, and each dic 49. Speer, “Aesthetics,” 677. 50. Speer, “Aesthetics,” 668. 51. After Frederick’s death in 1250, the task of safeguarding and editing the treatise fell to his favorite son, Manfred (Wood and Fyfe, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxxviii). Shortly after Manfred’s death in 1266, the Vatican codex was carried from Italy to Northern France, where Albertus Magnus’s De falconibus, asturibus, et accipitribus was appended to it. Between 1290 and 1300, Lord of Dampierre and Isabeau de Brienne-Eu (grandniece of Frederick II’s second wife, Yolanda of Brienne) had the manuscript copied into French and illustrated by Simon d’Orléans (Wood and Fyfe, “Manuscripts and Editions of the De Arte Venandi,” lxx).

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FIGURE 1. 1. Detail of folio 1r of De arte venandi cum avibus, l’art de chace des oisiaus, BnF MS Fr 12400. Used with permission from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

tates and gestures at the scribe, who holds a quill and a blade to correct his manuscript folio. The treatise prologue places composition in direct correspondence with falconry, staging an understanding of the two arts. With the mirroring of monk and falconer in this illustration, both the authority of composer and that of practitioner, and the authority of poet and that of reader, are held separate even as they are blended. The scribe’s illegible signs draw attention to the dissonance between words and their meaning, for the open book is physically frozen between established authority (the monk’s book) and the objects for which the signs stand (the falcon on the falconer’s fist). The entire group is overseen by a disproportionately large and conspicuously unhooded and unmanned falcon (to the right). That the colossal falcon wears no hood and lacks a human perch means that it is either completely controlled (so well trained that it has no need of the hood or the fist) or completely uncontrolled (still wild and yet to be trained). Positioning this solitary falcon figure on

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a marginal precipice that overlooks the entire scribal scene foregrounds the role of control not only in falconry but in writing more broadly. In falconry, control literally contains its opposite—the power of the object—because the falconer must release the bird to produce a spectacular flight and return. Ultimately, the open book’s central position demonstrates how falconry treatises asked their readers to think about the process of composition from the perspective of the object to be controlled: the book. Simon d’Orléans has thus illustrated the paradox of control in falconry in textual terms, substituting the body of the bird with a book. Such an illustration befits a treatise so concerned with establishing the aesthetic goals of falconry above any practical outcomes. By insisting that practical experience supplements theoretical knowledge, Frederick’s treatise authorizes the transfer of knowledge between a material practice like falconry and a theoretical one like poetics. Nicolette Zeeman argues for the appearance of medieval literary theories in unexpected places: “Although the medieval schools may have articulated their literary theory in analytical and explicit terms, other philosophers have in fact shared with medieval literary writers the sense that theory can be expressed in figural terms.”52 While not written in verse, Frederick’s treatise discusses the training of a bird in such figural terms, and the Latin prose is highly crafted. Though falconers train their birds to return to the glove through control of the bird’s weight—essentially, a balance of density, hunger, and strength—the objective of the art lies in the bird’s release. The goal of falconry then becomes aesthetic: the release allows the falcon to reach its highest point of ascent and then dive to produce a visually pleasing flight. Explicating this paradox of control and release, Frederick’s treatise anatomizes the training behind falconry’s aesthetic production. His goal is an aesthetic one: to control the falcon’s flight through the air by negotiating its weight on the ground and to create beauty with that flight. While it might be tempting to understand Frederick’s characterization of a falcon’s flight as beautiful in terms of approaching the divine, his secular and literary background suggests instead a poetic motive for authoring a beautiful flight. Frederick’s court brought literature and falconry together in multiple forms. Frederick himself was a falconer-poet, he employed in his court other falconer-poets such as Rinaldo d’Aquino and Jacopo Mostacci, and he patronized and participated in the creation of a vernacular form of poetry later dubbed by Dante the “Sicilian School.”53 Additionally, Frederick was fluent in Arabic and, having been brought up in Sicily, was familiar with Arab 52. Zeeman, “Imaginative Theory,” 239–40. 53. Migliorini and Griffith, Italian Language, 85.

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customs, including falconry. Conversant in the cultural and literary traditions of the Arab world, he employed in his court Theodore of Antioch and Michael Scot, both of whom translated numerous Arabic texts, including Aristotle’s De animalibus and two falconry treatises.54 But his authorship of the De arte venandi cum avibus goes beyond repeating the Arabic antecedents of falconry. He sought to experiment with his sources to create new forms, both in the practice of falconry and in the practices of writing and reading. Commentaries of Aristotle were available to Frederick, who patronized Scot’s translations of the Rhetoric and the Ethics,55 and it is therefore not impossible that the Averroes commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics found its way into Frederick’s court. Charles Homer Haskins states with certainty that “Frederick was familiar with the Aristotelian doctrines” circulating in the thirteenth century, and Averroes himself was rumored to have been a guest at his court.56 There is a modern critical hesitance to refer to the Averroes commentary on Poetics in a Western medieval context because it appears to cast “poetry [as] a branch of logic.”57 Yet, by the twelfth century, “logic” in the West was already taken up with language in a new way.58 Whether or not Frederick read Averroes’s Arabic commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, he was asking questions about logic and philosophy that he believed Aristotelian writings could answer, and he was investing resources into poetic experimentation in his Sicilian School of poetry. As Karla Mallette concludes in her examination of the thirteenth-century Greek-Syriac-Arabic-Latin transmission of Aristotle’s Poetics, “medieval poetic practice was not so much bounded by linguistic difference as generated by it [. . .] medieval poetics originated not in mimesis but in translation. This curious linguistic crucible—in which languages collided, commenting on, calquing, and transliterating one another—shaped the vernacular poetics that emerged from the late medieval Mediterranean in ways 59 that are still poorly understood.” The “fragmentation” and “multiplicity of linguistic traditions” of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Kingdom of Sicily creates the possibility that Frederick may have encountered a form of contemporaneous Arabic hunting poetry in his many interactions with Arab falconers.60 Arabic texts and liter 54. Akasoy, “Influence of the Arabic Tradition,” 55–56. Akasoy discusses these two treatises, identified as the “work of Adham and Ghitrif ” and Kitab al-Mutawakkili. Together, they make up the composite treatise translated from Arabic into Latin by Theodore of Antioch. 55. Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science, 248. 56. Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science, 265. 57. Hardison, Poetics & Praxis, 25. 58. Novikoff, Medieval Culture of Disputation, 64. 59. Mallette, “Beyond Mimesis,” 589. 60. Mallette, Kingdom of Sicily, 6.

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ary customs were undoubtedly influential on Frederick and his treatise, which some have argued was dedicated to the Sultan of Egypt, Malik El-Kamil.61 Sahar Amer suggests that Southern Italy’s role as a “gatewa[y] between Christian Europe and the Islamicate world” was not limited to the “transmission of Arabic sciences to the West” but also ushered into the West “Arabic literature and social customs,” such as “stories told, poetry recited, and songs sung.”62 Frederick’s interaction with Arab falconers and falconry customs during his negotiations with Malik El-Kamil in 1228 meant that he also may have witnessed the Arabic literary tradition of ṭardiyyat: hunting poems recorded and recited in praise of trained hawks. No scholar denies the influence of Syrian and Arab falconry practices on Frederick’s falconry techniques. For example, he learned about the use of the hood during his time with Arab falconers: “quando transivimus mare, vidimos quod ipsi Arabes utebantur capello in hac arte” (522.19–20; when we crossed the sea, we saw the Arabs themselves utilizing the hood in this art). There is more doubt, however, on the influence of Arabic poetry on the poetry of the Sicilian “troubadours,” the poets of Southern Italy who would later influence the stilnovisti in Florence, and from there become a cornerstone of European vernacular poetry. Scholars are hardpressed to find direct links to specific meters or other formal components of Arabic poetry in the early Italian vernacular poetry, and they generally disagree on the degree of “direct knowledge and imitation” that was possible in the thirteenth century.63 But we are missing an important cultural influence if we separate one artistic practice that we know they have in common in falconry from another artistic practice in poetry. In Arabic literary culture, falconry and poetry have much in common, and I believe it was this way, too, for the originators of Italian vernacular poetry, the poet-falconers of Frederick II’s court. A potential site of overlap between ars venandi, hunting arts, and ars poetica, poetic arts, the Arabic genre of ṭardiyyah helps evince this theory and helps us see the art of falconry from the perspective of poets contemporaneous and conversant with Frederick’s court. These poems simultaneously celebrate the flight of the falcon and the prowess of the poet. G. Rex Smith 61. The earliest codex is dedicated to “M.E.” and in later manuscripts to “M.S.” Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe approve of the suggestion that the earlier version is dedicated to Malik El-Kamil, whom Frederick met and with whom he continued epistolary correspondence, and who Wood and Fyfe contend may have even encouraged the production of the treatise. Malik-El Kamil died in 1238, so the later treatises dedicated to M.S. are possibly directed toward the Sultan’s son, Malik-es-Salih (Wood and Fyfe, “Manuscripts and Editions of the De Arte Venandi,” lxxxiii–iv). 62. Amer, “Reading Medieval French Literature,” 370–71. 63. Ahmad, History of Islamic Sicily, 94.

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concludes his chapter on Arabic hunting poetry in the 1990 Cambridge History of Arabic Literature with the definitive statement that after the late tenth century, “the ṭardiyyah loses its importance as a genre and passes into relative obscurity.”64 However, in 2007 Thomas Bauer published a study on Mamluk hunting literature that refutes Smith’s claim, positing the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as “a third heyday of Arabic hunting literature” and offering a catalog of hunting poems from this period to prove it.65 This literary history means that the Arabic hunting poems co-occurred with the height of falconry’s popularity in the Sicilian court of Frederick II, who hunted with Arab falconers in Italy and abroad. Rather than demonstrating Frederick’s devotion to Christianity or his obedience to papal orders, the Sixth Crusade was “rather a progress which deepened Islamic influence on [Frederick’s] intellectual and artistic taste and his life-style.”66 His encounter with Arab falconers during, preceding, and after the Sixth Crusade introduced Frederick to falconry practices, potentially inclusive of the hunting poetry that Bauer has shown was alive and well during this time. I contend that his adoption of falconry techniques and his familiarity with the cultural practice of falconry in Arab and Syrian culture is part of this “influence” on “intellectual and artistic taste,” later manifested in his approach to writing about and theorizing falconry training. The Arabic hunting poems were not only about the bird per se; they used description of flight to showcase poetic bravura. Jocelyn Sharlet argues for the discursive role of hunting birds in her examination of tenth-century ṭardiyyat by ʿAbbāsid poet Ibn al-Mu’tazz. When his hunting poems feature hawks in images of writing, they use the representation of training birds to evoke the poetic process.67 The connection between poetry and falconry underpins Frederick’s treatise; the ṭardiyyah’s self-reflexive celebration of poeticizing trained falcons’ flight from the fist to their apex is everywhere in Frederick’s work. I’m not suggesting that Frederick copied the hunting poems himself, but what I think the hunting poems can show us is an aesthetic appreciation for the form that falconry took. And this attention persists across Frederick’s falconry treatise. The Arabic hunting poems and De arte venandi cum avibus share a reflection on the production of aesthetic value—they both rely on the form of the trained bird to generate beauty.

64. Smith, “Hunting Poetry,” 184. 65. Bauer, “Dawadar’s Hunting Party,” 291. 66. Ahmad, History of Islamic Sicily, 85. 67. Sharlet’s essay “Where the Wild Things Are: Descriptive Poetry about Wildlife and Kushājim’s Book about Hunting” is part of an unpublished manuscript.

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This excerpt from a fourteenth-century hunting poem attributed to Shihab al-Din Ibn Fadl Allah conveys the unique contribution of hunting with birds of prey to the poetic genre. After an episode of “hunting gazelles and onagers [a species of wild donkey] with arrows, dogs, and cheetahs” on the ground, the poet lyricizes the final hunting episode of the day, hunting birds in the sky with two formidable hawks.68 When the poet refers to “birds” in the first and last lines, he is speaking of the prey birds being hunted; the falconry birds, on the other hand, are named here as saker falcons and goshawks: And off flew the birds, only to take fright and flee away, for the [falconers] had sent to them a ‘sent’ affliction In form of all the sakers with quivering wings, created from the element of wind, In form of all the goshawks of outstanding rank, silver their body, golden their eyes. Their beaks move back and forth between their claws, and in the action they look like sharp swords. And they make every flock swoop down, so that it seems as if a string of pearls was broken, scattering its beads. 69 They emptied the sky from birds, and this provided for the utmost joy!

This six-line section of the sixty-four-line poem demonstrates the poetic potential of falconry’s paradox of control and release. The excerpt is framed with a consideration of two human perspectives: artists (the falconers) (line 1) and audience provided with “the utmost joy” (line 6). The falconers control the birds on the ground and design the flight described in the four middle lines. The falconers “sent” the prey a “‘sent’ affliction,” and here begins the poetic wordplay. The first iteration of the word “sent” refers to the action of the human handlers (the falconers) releasing the hawks, and the second refers to the hawks themselves, an affliction or a weapon that is “sent,” or transmitted from the falconers to the prey. The distance between the two iterations of the word “sent” is paradoxical: the human handlers are performing the action of sending the hawks. In that moment, they are in control of the attack. But between the falconers’ sending and the hawks’ position as a “sent” affliction, something occurs: the falconers lose control temporarily when releasing their hawks into the sky. The pun “sent” is a vestige of this former control. The wordplay brings together multiple contradictions: the hawks are their own 68. Bauer, “Dawadar’s Hunting Party,” 302. 69. Shihab al-Din Ibn Fadl Allah, muzdawija ṭardiyya (hunting poem in rhyming couplets), lines 40–45. Translation by Bauer, “Dawadar’s Hunting Party,” 311.

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agents, in control of their own bodies; the hawks are instruments of the falconers, controlled by them; the falconers are hesitant that the hawks will flee; the falconers are assured that they will return. Recasting the hawks as an affliction transmitted, sent, and controlled by the falconers is an attempt to disregard the potential of the hawks’ agency in the moment of release. But this transmission also applies to the exchange between the poet who is watching and the falconer as artist who is creating the circumstances that merit this poetic record. The hawks themselves flying from the falconers to the sky are both free and contained in the central four lines depicting their flight. They are contained within the limits of poetic expression and human ability to control that description, but they also slip beyond the human ability to see them and to understand their movements. The poem casts the hawks as “forms” broken down to elements of “wind,” “silver,” “gol[d],” and iron (“swords”) shaped by both the falconer and the poet. Their flight, composed of wings and the element of wind, is controlled by training, their body by human regulation of diet, their eyes by human maintenance of ophthalmic health. And their instruments of death, their “beaks” and “claws,” are disassociated from their own bodies and their own control by the poetic line. The poem likens them to swords, instruments forged by humans and separate from human bodies in a way very dissimilar, in fact, to beaks and claws intrinsic to avian bodies. This figurative fragmentation of their bodies into artificial parts creates the illusion that they are as controllable as inanimate weaponry. The final images of hawks as swords and prey as pearls completes the shift to reframing these birds as objects familiar to the poem’s human audience. Where their alien bodies may have threatened the notion that humans don’t quite understand the avian body and therefore cannot subjugate it, the poetic familiarity with that body as individual objects that can be mastered renders them more legible to a human audience. The last line, too, considers the audience of the hunting party alongside the readers of the poem. The flight itself and the description of the flight both provide “the utmost joy” in their reception. What these trained sakers and goshawks do in the sky is poetic for their human trainers—not just a natural beauty observed in passing but an aesthetic production created by the tension between control and release. The image of a flock of prey birds as a string of scattered pearls in the sky was one that falconers created through their careful control and timely release of the hunting birds, and the poem memorializing this moment crystallizes that tension as aesthetic beauty. Frederick’s treatise describes this control in terms that resonate with the hunting poem’s aesthetic aims. Representing the experience of watching the bird nearly fly away, Frederick aestheticizes the contradiction of flight, the ten-

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sion between control and release. As set forth in De arte venandi cum avibus, the aesthetic goals of falconers are driven by the controlled distance between the falconers and their birds: “Qui vero volant prope terram, volatus eorum est minus laudabilis” (788.11–12; But those who fly close to the ground have a less laudable flight), and moderate heights are “laudibilis [. . .] non tantum” (788.5; not as laudable) as lofty flights. The higher the falcon flies, the farther it is from the falconer’s control. But the higher it flies, the more beautiful is its display of ascent, pitch, and stoop. The treatise takes for granted that there is an audience watching that will qualify the flight as more laudable or more beautiful than that of less well-trained falcons—or indeed, falcons that rely only on their natural flying instincts and have not been trained to augment their abilities for aesthetically pleasing purposes. The falconer trains the falcon to pursue a particular prey (often not the prey it would pursue on its own) as a means of achieving this aesthetic end. For example, in the section on training the saker falcon, De arte venandi cum avibus discusses suitability in aesthetic rather than natural terms: “set quoniam convenibilius est falconi sacro volare ad ayrones quam ad alias aves et pulcrius volat ad ayrones quam ad aliud, dicemus qualiter doceri debet specialiter ad ayrones” (828.6–9; but since it is more suitable for the saker falcon to fly at herons than at other birds, and since it flies more beautifully at herons than at the others, we shall say how it ought to be trained at herons specifically). Frederick goes on to admit that “naturale non est ipso capere airones per se” (828.23–24; it is not natural for [the saker] to take herons on its own), provoking us to ask what exactly makes flying at this quarry “convenibilius” for the saker, if not a natural suitability. The text supplies an explanation for this odd substitution, a revision of the saker’s natural flight, only a few words later: it is more suitable for the purpose of art; it is more suitable because “it flies more beautifully.” For an Arab hunting party, this flight provided ready poetic imagery soon to be rendered verse by the attendant poet-hunter. What the Arabic hunting poems and Frederick’s court seem to share is an understanding that both falconry and poetry are about training, about control, and about using artifice to shape natural behavior into an aesthetic achievement. In this description of falconry’s artifice, Frederick’s description of training birds to fly after unnatural prey resonates with Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s justification for using words in nonproper, or unnatural ways. His section ornatus graves, weighty ornamentation, likens the use of figurative tropes to a pilgrimage: Noli semper concedere verbo In proprio residere loco: residentia talis

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Dedecus est ipsi verbo; loca propria vitet Et perigrinetur alibi sedemque placentem Fundet in alterius fundo: sit ibi novus hospes, Et placeat novitate sua. (763–68) [Do not always allow a word to reside in its usual place; such residence does not suit it; let it avoid its proper place and [go on a pilgrimage] elsewhere, to find a pleasing seat in another’s ground: let it be a new sojourner there and 70 please by its novelty.]

Katherine Willis offers an incisive reading of Geoffrey’s pilgrimage metaphor, pointing out the role of the image in the overall aims of ornatus graves: to illustrate “the subtle efficacy [.  .  .] that takes place when the proper or literal sense is so familiar and quotidian that initially it conceals its nature and meaning and thus takes the reader wondrously by surprise.”71 In fact, Willis notes that the image of the pilgrimage has been obscured by translations that shy away from employing this word. Translating “perigrinetur” as “go on a pilgrimage” in this passage, Willis argues, is imperative to understanding Geoffrey’s illustration of how ornamental tropes “sen[d] a word on a pilgrimage from its own, accustomed, proper place to a place not its own.”72 It is not coincidental that falconry’s aesthetic interest is entirely dependent on the falcon’s flight, and even the name of the peregrine falcon resonates with this aesthetic marvel. Geoffrey employs this metaphor to describe the pleasure of watching words wend their way in an image on an unconventional path, and this is also what Frederick describes when he discusses training a bird to fly in a way that is unexpected according to its natural tendencies.

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF CATEGORIES This chapter has thus far discussed the different linguistic, cultural, and philosophical influences surrounding the production of Frederick’s treatise. To fully understand how falconry can be an “intellectual exercise,” I conclude with a closer look at the training described in Frederick’s treatise, beginning with Frederick’s commitment to the production of the treatise itself. Perhaps the first and most striking contradiction in Frederick’s approach to falconry 70. Citations and translations to the Gallo edition of Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria Nova occur parenthetically in text by line number. I have substituted Gallo’s “wander” with Willis’s “go on a pilgrimage.” 71. Willis, “Poetry of the Poetria Nova,” 277. 72. Willis, “Poetry of the Poetria Nova,” 281.

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is also the most tragic for the material history of De arte venandi cum avibus: his obsession with falconry above all else resulted in the loss of the imperial copy of the manuscript (ms. X). In 1244 Frederick began compiling his thirty years of notes into the Liber de arte venandi cum avibus “at the urgent request of [Frederick’s son] Manfred.”73 The book went with him everywhere; in the event of spontaneous hawking conditions or encounters with falconers who brought new methods, he strove to always “redigere in librum quicquid Nostra experientia” (2.19; redirect back into the book all of Our experience). Even at the expense of “Imperii regimina” (2.25; control of the Empire), he vowed “non postposuimus” (2.25–26; never to consider secondary) the compilation of his treatise. And this vow proved true on the morning of February 18, 1248. As he did each day even while occupying the city of Vittoria during ongoing fighting with the Guelphs, Frederick, along with his son Manfred and fifty other soldiers, “left at dawn to go hawking in the vast marshes surrounding Parma,” leaving their camp open to invasion.74 The Battle of Parma ensued in Frederick’s absence and the imperial manuscript, hitherto waiting at the base camp for Frederick to add his observations from the day’s hunt, was seized by the victorious Guelphs. The manuscript is still lost, and we won’t know if it was more complete than the extant copies remaining. But scholars are certain that even the oldest copies are incomplete, as the text makes reference to several chapters and topics not found in any extant version.75 The twelve extant manuscripts of Frederick’s falconry treatise survive in two groups: they are divided into either two or six books. All the two-book versions bear the editorial mark of Manfred, who was left with his father’s notes, while the “six-book family was not thus revised and supplemented” but 76 “fills the lacunae” of the two-book family. The two-book Vatican MS Pal. Lat. 1071, revised and compiled by Manfred between 1258 and 1266, contains over nine hundred marginal illustrations in its 111 folios. The oldest of the six-book version, Bologna MS Lat. 419 (717), “may, in part, be one of a num 73. Haskins, “‘De Arte Venandi cum Avibus’ of the Emperor Frederick II,” 342. Haskins contends that the treatise is in fact dedicated to Manfred. It could be, Wood and Fyfe suggest, that the earliest version of the treatise was dedicated to the Sultan, Malik-El Kamil, earlier in the century, and as Frederick saw his son Manfred grow and “shar[e] his love of falconry,” he dedicated a copy of the treatise to him along with all of his notes. In fact, in the Vatican codex, Manfred uses those notes and his own observations to fill in missing information (Wood and Fyfe, “Manuscripts and Editions of the De Arte Venandi,” lxxxiv). 74. Budriesi, “Introduction,” xlvi. Translated from the Italian: “era uscito all’alba per la caccia col falco nelle vaste valudi che circondavano Parma.” 75. See Wood and Fyfe for a detailed account of these references in “Manuscripts and Editions of the De Arte Venandi,” lxxxiv–lxxxvii. 76. Haskins, “‘De Arte Venandi cum Avibus’ of the Emperor Frederick II,” 337.

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ber of copies prepared during Frederick’s lifetime.”77 This thirteenth-century 144-folio manuscript contains eight illuminations, one for each of the two general prologues and six books. Book I, “De divisione generaliter avium” (On the Division of Birds in General), is an ambitious ornithological study, differentiating into categories the habits and habitats of all birds, from aquatic to land, rapacious to nonrapacious, and the Vatican codex contains detailed illustrations of the different species. Book II, “De venatione et de eius particulis” (On Hunting and Its Parts), discusses falconry birds in more detail and begins to instruct the reader regarding the methods of capturing birds from the nest, the accoutrements needed for manning them, and the environment and nourishment needed for their growth into adult birds. Book III, “De mansuefactione falconum cum capello, sequitur dicere de instrumentis per que redeant ad homines” (On the Taming of a Falcon with the Hood, followed by a Discussion of the Equipment Thanks to Which They Return to Humans), progresses the training with the use of the hood, and other instruments for more advanced training procedures in preparation for hunting—preparation for the moment of release. The remaining three books are each dedicated to a specific falconry bird and a specific prey bird. These final chapters represent the different aerial aesthetics that the training described in the previous three books makes possible: flying gyrfalcons at cranes; flying saker falcons at herons; and flying peregrine falcons at ducks. After a detailed discussion of waterfowl, songbirds, and raptorial birds in Book I, Book II turns to a description of the humans interested in interacting with these birds. Frederick’s description of an ideal falconer in Book II confounds the subject of the training with its object—the falcon itself drops from the power dynamic, and instead it is the falconer who serves the art. The ideal falconer practices falconry not for individual gain or pleasure or mastery over another creature but to bring the art closer to perfection: “Cum enim ars longa sit, et plura in usu secondum eam noviter incidant, nunquam debet homo desistere ab exercitio huius artis, set perseverare, quamdiu vixerit, ut ipsam artem perfectius consequatur” (348.11–14; Seeing that, indeed, this is an art that takes a long time and furthermore, in practice many new aspects emerge, the [falconer] should never desist from practicing this art, but should persevere, as long as he lives, to attain completeness for the art itself). Treating the art itself as the ultimate master begins to unsettle notions that the treatise merely teaches humans how to achieve mastery over another creature. In the prologue to Book II, Frederick further complicates the idea of human superiority by way of artistic servitude. He admits that falcons are 77. Wood and Fyfe, “Manuscripts and Editions of the De Arte Venandi,” lxxxii.

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instruments in the hands of human artists, but those artists are also bound and even subject to the keeping and honing of those instruments: “Quamvis sint instrumenta artificis, tamen artifex versat intentionem suam circa ipsas habendas et instruendas” (280.1–3; Although they [birds of prey] are instruments of the artist, nevertheless the artist must wrap his mind around keeping and teaching them). Defining the human as an artist bound to artistic instruments pushes the theory of falconry into the realm of artistic thralldom, aligning De arte with Poetria Nova, which instructs its readers to “sit sermo domesticus arti” (1092; let the lecture be the servant of the art). In fact, in describing the hierarchy for the practice, Frederick privileges artistic creation over material gain: “finis qui movet artificem, et eius intentio est prior, ut habeat aves rapaces, que docte sint per suam artem capere non rapaces eo modo, quem ipse vult, posterior vero, ut cum ipsis arte doctis capiat non rapaces” (280.23–26; the goal that moves the artist, and this intent is primary, should be to have falcons that are trained through [the falconer’s] art to take those nonrapacious [prey] birds in the way [the falconer] wants. The second priority of those trained in the art should be the actual taking of prey). In this way, the treatise differentiates between the “art of taking prey” and the actual taking of prey. Key here is the emperor’s qualifier: “eo modo, quem ipse vult.” To fulfill the aesthetic aim of falconry, the falconer is responsible for controlling the “way” the falcon chases prey—or in other words, the “way” the falcon flies. In controlling how the falcon flies, the falconer must impose artifice on the bird’s natural flight, as has been suggested in previous passages. The treatise describes odd substitutions in the training phase that are used to simulate beautiful flights in preparation for flights at real prey. For instance, in training gyrfalcons, Frederick proposes in Book III that the best way to achieve skill is to practice and train with a hare: “nullum volare pulcrius aut convenientius est ei, quod faciat ad grues, quam illud, quod adiscit cum lepore” (652.13–14; no other flying is more beautiful or more consistent with [the flight the gyrfalcon] makes at a crane than that which it learns with a hare). This substitution of hare for crane during training points to the artificial and participatory quality of falconry—it is an active practice in which the falconer intervenes to amplify the falcon’s natural flying habits. There is no material gain in acquiring hares to teach a falcon to fly at cranes. The aim is to develop the most beautiful flight through a series of interventions separating the nature of the bird from the artistic aims of the falconer, making visible in the sky the separation between nature and artifice. This artifice, an aesthetic form achieved through training rather than making, is significant for understanding how theories behind falconry intersect

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with medieval poetics. Poetics relies on the idea of form to “conceiv[e] of the process of creation or making as a movement from” the immaterial idea to the material thing, from the “informing of raw materials according to the script of some idea” to “the forming of an object guided by some thought.”78 In discussing medieval theories of form, Christopher Cannon observes that “a more comprehensive attitude” occurs in loftier writings “that would simply never stoop to describing a text because they were concerned with the divinely made shapes of the natural world.”79 He turns to Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica to elucidate how apparently contradictory Platonic and Aristotelian approaches to form actually operate simultaneously: form limits matter and matter limits form. That is, a thought is required to place limits around or give shape to a thing, but thoughts are dependent on things to inhabit a shape. “The result,” Cannon explains, “is a constant tension in the concept of form, but a tension that allows it to name the relations, movements, and moments where the material and the immaterial meet.”80 This tension might also be reconceived in terms of control: form has control over matter, but matter also has control over form. In falconry, control is always uncertain, and each phase of training is determined by increments of movement between control and release. The falcon’s flight is something between rawness and artifice, materiality and immateriality: it is a “divinely made shap[e] of the natural world” altered through human training. The shape is defined by the treatise and lent form in the air, but it is also transient. The flight is memorialized both prescriptively in the treatise, while still an idea, and subsequently through figurative description. It is a fleeting, immaterial form, but one achieved with material objects—the lure, the glove, the jesses, the hood, the bird. Falconry does not recreate or make an artificial copy of the natural world in an altogether separate form, like a cathedral or a poem. The form that arises from falconry is achieved through a material practice: the matter of avian and human bodies, the repetitive movements required of training, and the immaterial space between bird and glove. The aesthetics of training, then, help us understand the tension between form and matter in other categories. The interaction between form and matter recalls medieval ideas of sexual difference, and here is where the poetics of control in falconry is useful for thinking about gender in medieval narrative in the following chapters. Aristotelian ideas about form and matter—whether employed for explaining how an idea gives shape to a thing or a seed gives shape to offspring—“translate 78. Cannon, “Form,” 177. 79. Cannon, “Form,” 181. 80. Cannon, “Form,” 181.

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into superiority and inferiority, ability and inability, activity and passivity.”81 According to Aristotelian views cited by medieval thinkers including Frederick, a male body is hot and dry whereas a female body is cold and moist. In sexual reproduction of humans and birds alike, the father’s heat lends form to the mother’s matter. Joan Cadden describes how the pairs of terms hot/ dry, form/matter “create a radical contrast between the sexes. The contrast contains unambiguous value implications, since in Aristotle’s system active is clearly better than passive, form better than matter.”82 This chapter has already discussed how falconry renders ambiguous one set of values in aesthetics: the human artist must submit to the patient training of the avian instrument. In this regard, falconry training confounds the order of Aristotelian hierarchies in poetics. But Aristotelian ideas about natural reproduction and poetic production come to a crossroads in the most pressing question Frederick is asked by his hawking colleagues: why is the female hawk larger than the male? Cuius femina est maior masculo, hec est proprietas non modicum substantialis. Nam in nullis animalium Nobis notis reperitur quod femina sit maior masculo, immo equalis vel minor in omnibus reperitur. Quod quare accidit, rationes, quas vidimus super hac questione, sufficientes dicimus et in scriptis redigi fecimus, eo quod ab utentibus venationibus cum avibus rapacibus sepe interrogati fuimus de hac questione, et sunt hec. (1102.34–39) [The fact that the female is larger than the male is a quality not insignificant. In fact, in none of the animals that We recognize, does one find that the female has larger dimensions than the male; in all others one finds the dimensions equal or smaller. The reasons why this should be the case We will expose exhaustively and have them put in writing because We have many times been asked about this problem by those who hunt with raptors.]

This question is monumental because it goes unaddressed through most of the comprehensive treatise. The treatise makes an assumption that subverts human value implications: the ideal falconry birds are female but not because they are more naturally submissive or easier to exploit physically. In his answer, Frederick employs Aristotelian theories to explain female dominance. All birds, because they fly rapidly through the air, “sint calide nature” (1104.14; are hot by nature); but the female sex profits from its cold and humid nature: “calor igitur intensus rapacium et humidum spissum et terreum ipsarum, 81. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, 23. 82. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, 24.

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remissa a frigiditate et humido aqueo sexus feminei, magnitudinem corporis in feminis operantur et econtrario in masculis parvitatem” (1104.36–38; therefore, the intense heat of raptors and their moist, dense, earthy characteristics, mitigated by the coldness and moistness of the female sex, creates a largeness of body in females and on the contrary, smallness in males). This is where our own implicit biases that assume an ingrained human sexism do a disservice to thinking about recuperating power for an oppressed human gender. Michelle Sauer examines this set of value implications from another angle, the role of the medical treatise in establishing human gender hierarchy: “One of the primary functions of medical texts is to define the human body by means of an idealized, centralized figure that stands as the model for all other bodies. By default, in patriarchal societies, this body is male. When the female body is discussed, it is revealed through its difference from (and inferiority to) the male body.”83 When the male body is discussed in Frederick’s treatise, it is the marked sex, noteworthy only for its deviation from the superior, and therefore default, female body: “Triciolis et minoribus inter falcones dari debet pro pastu sufficienti minor quantitas carnium” (374.4–5; Tiercels [male birds] and other small falcons should be given for food a sufficiently smaller quantity of meat). Naming the male separately here reveals that throughout the treatise, all raptorial bodies can be presumed female unless otherwise noted. The contradictions explored in this chapter finally leave us with the idea that falconry exposes the faultiness of categories. Despite spending quires categorizing species, separating them by their characteristics, dividing training procedures approved and unapproved, De arte venandi cum avibus unsettles more divisions than it creates. The text finally asks whether hierarchy may be a flawed model to conceive of art—mastery over a subject could be, the text suggests, the wrong way to understand what artists do. The aesthetics of training produce a control achieved “ex arte” (408.2; by art) and “ex consuetudine” (408.2; by habit) and not by “falco fatigationibus” (408.2; exhaustion of the falcon).

83. Sauer, Gender in Medieval Culture, 25.

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

In addition to the rise of the falconry treatise in a courtly education, the thirteenth century saw women using the image of the female falconer in poetic and visual representation. Considering now our titular hawking women, this chapter introduces the book’s claim that falconry enables a feminist poetics from within a culture of training. To gain a fuller view of the role of gender in hawking imagery, the chapter adds another medium from material culture: personal seals. The most popular icon on women’s seals from the mid-­ thirteenth century was a female falconer; during the same period, the first sonnets appeared in Frederick II’s Sicilian School of poetry, and one of the earliest of these, “Tapina in me ch’amava uno sparvero” (Wretched me, who loved a sparrowhawk), casts a female speaker in the role of falconer lamenting the release of her hawk. The female speaker’s relationship to her bird in the sonnet and women’s relationship to their birds on the seals foreground the image of the hawking woman in a remarkably explicit way. Seals and sonnets both reflect medieval modes of self-representation, and the following pages explore how the representation of release in falconry creates a specifically feminist control, derived in an alternative signifying system: a female hawk’s inherent superiority over its male counterpart translates to the primacy of the female in visual and poetic representation. The previous chapter established the aesthetics of training unique to falconry but ended on an implicit anxiety about a gendered problem, or “ques• 54 •

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tio,” for Frederick and his contemporaries: why are female hawks larger than male hawks? There is a modern scientific name for this medieval problem: reversed sexual dimorphism. Ornithologists Helmut C. Mueller and Kenneth Meyer trace “the first hypothesis on the functions of reversed sexual dimorphism” precisely to Frederick II’s thirteenth-century treatise.1 Sexual dimorphism simply means that two sexes of a species are differently formed beyond their difference in sexual organs; though the qualification of “reversed” to denote that unlike other species, namely mammalian ones, the female is bigger, aptly demonstrates the phalloanthropocentric bias in scientific language. This bias helps explain the discomfort felt by Frederick’s contemporaries in their attempts to understand how such a hierarchy might exist alongside their patriarchal human social order. The dimorphism is not subtle, either, but “can be great: the average weight of the female can be almost twice that of the 2 male.” For all hawks, that is, all shortwings (i.e., sparrowhawks), broadwings (i.e., buzzards in Europe, red-tailed hawks in North America), and longwings (i.e., peregrines), the female is the default. It is the default in language and the default in power. The female is at least one-third larger and a more dominant and powerful hunter than the male, and she is the alpha in a visually striking way (fig. 2.1). Female raptor larger size and dominance over their male counterparts translates to nomenclature as well: the standard term for different species refers to the female only. That is, if the word sparrowhawk appears, as it does in the sonnet, it signifies the female short-winged hawk, and the language of medieval treatises privileges the female term. Even today, for example, the term falcon technically refers to the female peregrine only, while the male is the tiercel, so called because males are roughly one-third smaller than females. Though most species of hawks are solitary except during mating season and are thus not social in the same way as many mammals, the raptor society is not a patriarchy or comparable to a patriarchy in any way. And though we cannot know what these birds thought or think of this claim, we do know what the humans who sought them and lived with them thought of the raptor hierarchy—the female was the default in the mind of the falconer as well. Locating sexual dimorphism in the form of the sonnet offers one way to address critical impasses facing animal studies and premodern feminist studies. These impasses concern the limits of knowledge: What can we know about what an animal thinks? How can we ascertain the sex of a premodern author, and what does that knowledge do? In their introduction to a Hypatia

1. Mueller and Meyer, “Evolution of Reversed Sexual Dimorphism in Size,” 65. 2. Mueller and Meyer, “Evolution of Reversed Sexual Dimorphism in Size,” 65.

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FIGURE 2. 1. The male gyrkin (left) is about one-third smaller than the female gyrfalcon (right). Detail of folio 87v in De arte venandi cum avibus, l’art de chace des oisiaus, BnF MS Fr 12400. Used with permission from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

special issue on animals and feminism, Lori Gruen and Kari Weil remark on the potential of critical animal studies to confront the limits of representation itself: “Insofar as nonhuman animals have been locked within our faulty representations of them, we can see the recent turn to animals as responding to a desire to find something outside of representation itself or to locate those who might resist our flawed linguistic system. On this account, it is we humans who are encaged by our representations and the world they enforce.”3 For humans, encaged in a phallogocentrism that produces systemic misogyny, reading through hawk sexual dimorphism offers a glimpse into a different world. I do not suggest that sexual dimorphism as poetic form resolves the impasses or remedies “our flawed linguistic system”; rather, reading for



3. Gruen and Weil, “Animal Others,” 480.

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form in this sonnet and on these seals reconfigures the power structure of the human readers who encounter them. Frederick’s “questio” comes to feminist fruition when met with representations of female falconers handling female hawks. A marked sex (female human) meets a default sex (female hawk) in this configuration, as we shall see in the sonnet purportedly by a woman known only as “La Nina Siciliana.” Reading this sonnet through hawk sexual dimorphism introduces an alternative for interpreting female speech. Regina Psaki offers a helpful configuration for the plight of the marked sex in representation: “Any female character is simultaneously her specific (created) self and expressly not-male, whereas virtually every male character is solely himself, not expressly not-female. In this sex/gender system women’s speech has the double burden of representing an individual woman and the entire female sex.”4 The image of female falconer with female hawk evokes the double burden of women but momentarily grants the female speaker the privilege of the dominant sex through her female hawk.

“TAPINA IN ME” AND THE VATICAN CANZONIERE “Tapina in me” appears to recount a narrative of desertion between two lovers and leave the female speaker abandoned; yet, together with the seals and the visual representation of hawk sexual dimorphism, the sonnet conveys a narrative of self-assertion. The seals most obviously do this through their form and function: seals are meant to signify identity and authority. But scholars have been mystified by their seemingly contradictory image of hawking women that, I argue, the dynamic movement within the sonnet engages. These two forms of representation begin to piece together the role of hawking women in medieval thought. The poetic form of sexual dimorphism allows the recovery of self instead of a loss of the beloved. This recovery is visual when considering hawk sexual dimorphism because the female outsizes the male. If this is true for hawks literally, physically, then it is true for the speaker of the poem figurally, through both her formal tactics in the sonnet and the shape of the sonnet itself. Though “Tapina in me” is unattributed in the Vatican Canzoniere, a collection of thirteenth-century Frederician poems composing MS Vaticano Latino 3793, mid-nineteenth-century scholar Francesco Trucchi posited that La Nina

4. Psaki, “Voicing Gender in the Decameron,” 102–3.

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Siciliana was its author.5 In the thirteenth century, the Sicilian School experimented with multiple poetic forms in the vernacular, most notably the sonnet. Frederician poet Giacomo da Lentini has been attributed with the invention of the sonnet: a fourteen-line poem divided into an octave and a sestet, with an alternating rhyme scheme on each side of the division.6 The sonnets on this folio, like those throughout the manuscript, use brackets to separate the two parts of the poem, combining the octave into four lines and the sestet into three, with implicit line breaks in the middle of each line. The effect is visually dimorphic: one part of the poem dominates the other, and the brackets reform this dominance into an explicitly larger shape. This pattern repeats five times on each folio, creating five sets of large brackets overshadowing five smaller brackets. The manuscript contains another inverted bracket after some sonnets, and this bracket signifies the end of a tenzone: a call-and-response pair of sonnets. La Nina Siciliana’s sonnet is the initiating poem, or the call-sonnet, of this two-part tenzone and is followed by an anonymous response-sonnet which does not invoke the hawking metaphor initiated in the call-sonnet. Because the poetry movement to which her sonnet belongs was led by Frederick II, the pre-eminent expert on falconry who surrounded himself with other falconer-poets, we might expect lyrical hawking references to pepper the manuscript or at least the response-sonnet. But instead, the lack of falconry references in the Vatican Canzoniere is highly conspicuous. La Nina Siciliana’s sonnet stands out as unique, then, not only because she is one of only two female contributors to the Vatican Canzoniere but because hers is the only 7 poem of one thousand to mention falconry. The sonnet not only mentions it but leans entirely on an intricate knowledge of the practice and theories of falconry, ostensibly recounting the story of an abandoned falconer-lover: Tapina in me ch’amava uno sparvero: / Amavalo tanto, ch’io me ne moria; A lo richiamo bene m’era manero, / E dunque troppo pascere no’l dovia. Or è montato e salito sì altero / Assai più alto che far non solia; Ed è asiso dentro d’uno verzero, / Un’altra donna lo tene in balìa. 5. Trucchi, Poesie Italiane, 53. For a more modern account in favor of the existence of La Nina Siciliana, see Paola Malpezzi Price, “Uncovering Women’s Writings: Two Early Italian Women Poets.” For an opposing view, see Anne L. Klinck, “Poetic Markers of Gender in Medieval ‘Woman’s Song’: Was Anonymous a Woman?” I align my view with that of Malpezzi Price, who rejects the suggestion that “Tapina in me” is part of the male-authored cantigas de amigo tradition of ventriloquizing a woman’s voice. Malpezzi Price finds similarities between the French female trobairitz and thirteenth-century Italian female poets and suggests that the French poets may have influenced the Italians directly, through manuscript circulation. 6. Wilkins, Invention of the Sonnet, 17. 7. Malpezzi Price also notes the uniqueness of the metaphor and that the only other bird to appear in Italian courtly lyrics is the “mythical phoenix” (“Uncovering Women’s Writings,” 6), a creature that Frederick dismisses in his treatise (1106.2)

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Isparvero mio, ch’io t’avea nodrito; / Sonalglio d’oro ti facea portare, Perchè dell’uccellar fosse più ardito; / Or se’ salito sì come lo mare, 8 Ed a’ rotti li gieti e se’ fugito / Quando eri fermo nel tuo ucellare. [Wretched me, who loved a sparrowhawk: / Loved it so much that I would die over it. It was well trained to my call, / And therefore I didn’t have to overfeed it. Now it has mounted and risen so high, / Much higher than it usually does, And it is seated inside an orchard, / And another woman has it at her mercy. My own sparrowhawk, I had nourished you; / I had you wear a golden bell So that you would be more ardent in hawking. / Now you have risen so, like the sea, And you’ve broken the jesses and you’ve escaped, / When once you were constant in your hawking.]

The poem takes as its theme something common to all who are familiar with falconry: releasing the bird, hoping it returns to the glove, and then memorializing the training experience when it does not. Criticism has tended either to argue for or against female authorship of the sonnet, or to explicate the poem’s references to falconry, which is helpful for us today, removed from falconry as an everyday practice, but this approach supplants more interesting formal elements once these references are defined. Though there is a quite straightforward way of interpreting the falconry conceit (the speaker’s beloved has chosen another lover), attention to form helps address three interpretive impasses evoked by the poem: the falconer in the poem is female; the sex of the hawk is female; the authorship is uncertain. A close look at the poem demonstrates how hawk sexual dimorphism formalizes these impasses. Although falconry training comparisons had not become entirely commonplace such that as soon as people thought of training a hawk, they immediately made the comparison to training a woman, typically, lyrical falconry comparisons place the male human in the position of falconer and the female human in the position of hawk. For example, Provençal troubadour poetry in the decades leading up to the sonnet cast the speaker as a falconer who hopes he has overcome the lady’s wild nature through system 8. La Nina Siciliana, “Tapina in me ch’amava uno sparvero.” I have consulted the De Blasi and Contini editions for the transcription but have followed the orthography of the Canzoniere Vaticano (MS. Vat. Lat. 3793). My translation. I have combined lines of the sonnet according to the mise-en-page of the manuscript folio to better illustrate the dimorphic form of the sonnet’s octave and sestet.

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atic domestication, or training. The cause of the poet’s lament is the uncertainty of this domestication, as in Giraut de Bornelh’s heartsick lyric “No posc sofrir c’a la dolor.” The speaker dreams of an “esparvier” (sparrowhawk) on his hand that “semblav’adomesgatz, / anc non vi tan salvatge, / mas pueis fo maniers e privatz / e de bonz jetz apreiszonatz” (seemed domesticated, yet [he] had never seen one so wild, / but later she became manned and tame, and bound with good jesses).9 In Peire Vidal’s lyric comparison, too, the hawk, “qui jove dona vol amar” (like the young woman one wishes to love), is “fers entro qu’es domesiatz” (wild until she is domesticated), and then she becomes “maniers e privatz” (manned and tame).10 In these lyrics, the bird is always the female of the species. There is no accounting for the fact that, in the species, the female bird is dominant over her male counterpart, because the male bird is typically absent from the poem. The problem when we look at these texts is that we are looking at them with a disposition to translate “she” according to a human gender hierarchy rather than an avian one. It is not therefore surprising that when lyrics and falconry treatises describe the way “she” must be trained, we project analogies following our human hierarchy, which embeds subordination in the female pronoun. However, there are hierarchical and translational problems with this inclination. As discussed in the opening to this chapter, in the raptorial world, she was the default term in the same way he is for humans; females are the more powerful sex, and medieval approaches to understanding that phenomenon inflect the nomenclature. As mentioned, the names for hawks categorize the female as the default. So, when referring to a pronoun for falcon, the gender is always female, even if the noun itself is masculine. This is a two-pronged translation problem—translation from Romance languages and Latin to English and translation from avian species to human speech, for we can’t know what pronouns birds think in. Poetry that maps falconry allegories onto human behavior might appear to elide the gender hierarchy differences between the two species, especially when French or Italian masculine nouns designate female bird. In my translation of the Italian sonnet, I’ve used the neutral pronoun it not because I want to deny the hawk subjectivity but rather because I want to show our inherent gender bias in translation. All other published translations of this sonnet use the male pronoun because they presume a heterosexual relationship between a female speaker and male beloved. Apart from the narrative clue “un’altra 9. Giraut de Bornelh, “No posc sofrir c’a’ la dolor,” XXXVII.17–20. This poem appears in Gourain’s chapter “The Classical Period” in The Troubadours, edited by Gaunt and Kay, 89–90. My translation. 10. Peire Vidal, “Neus ni gels ni plueja ni fanh,” XXXIV.10–16. This poem appears in Fraser, Songs of Peire Vidal: Translation and Commentary, 167–69. My translation.

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donna” (8; another woman), the feminine adjective tapina identifies the sonnet’s speaker as female. Although the nouns, pronouns, and adjectives referring to the speaker’s beloved are grammatically masculine (ending in “o”), this is a gender translation mismatch because the noun itself refers to a female subject. Sparvero designates a female sparrowhawk; the term for male of the species is moscado (English “musket”). The beloved female sparvero initiates an alternative reading to the presumed heteronormative allegoresis—a reading that suggests the speaker’s relationship with herself and her poetic voice, rather than with a male beloved. The poem’s accounting for a female “default” in this avian species responds to a tradition of falconry training metaphors that assume a dominant male falconer and subjugated female bird/lover as in the Provençal lyrics. English could render the pronoun she, but this choice erases the power inversion and confusion, which could be purposeful, and this takes us back to the impasses of animal knowledge and knowledge of premodern authorship. Italianist Paola Malpezzi Price points out that even when critics allow that poems such as “Tapina in me” were actually written by female authors, they “ascribe to women’s texts qualities that are different from, and implicitly inferior to, those accepted for male-authored works.”11 They have it both ways; they insist either that the sonnet is too sophisticated and deft to be written by a female author or that it is the inherently softer, simpler expression of feminine thought and ability, as is the case with Francesco De Sanctis, who admires “the perfect simplicity of the female sonnet, with a more lively, more immediate, and more natural movement.”12 “In stating that these poems are perfectly simple,” Malpezzi Price writes, “De Sanctis implicitly suggests that they lack the complexity and the firmness which he and most male critics considered essential features of a superior literary work and as characteristic 13 of men’s texts.” Let us examine one of these male-voiced exemplars in the response-sonnet half of the tenzone, found below “Tapina in me” on the manuscript folio. The response-sonnet dismisses both the concerns and the falconry conceit of the call-sonnet. In refusing to engage in the falconry conceit, the male speaker in the response-sonnet suggests that he does not view himself in the metaphor of the call-sonnet. Rather than responding to her call, then, his sonnet appears to reverse and undo the figurative work of her metaphor in a form of medieval gaslighting: 11. Malpezzi Price, “Uncovering Women’s Writings,” 2. 12. Trucchi, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, 23. Translated from the Italian: “la perfetta semplicità del sonetto femminile, con movenza più vivace, più immediata e più naturale.” 13. Malpezzi Price, “Uncovering Women’s Writings,” 3.

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Vis’ amorosa angelico e clero / In chui rengna savere e cortesia. Non v’apellate di tapino mestero / per creder cosa ch’esere non poria. Ch’io dipartisse da voi core e penzero? / Inanti foss’io morto quella dia: Ch’io altra gioia non volglio né spero / Se no la vostra gaia sengnoria E bene confesso sono alti salito, / Pensando che cangiato son d’amare Da voi chui sono fedele e giechito. / Chi altro vi fa credere o pensare 14 È disleale, larone e traito, / che vuol la nostra gioia disturbare. [Loving, angelic, and clear visage, / In which reins understanding and courtesy, Do not call on a wretched mystery / To believe something that couldn’t be. That I would part from you heart and thought? / Would that I were dead before such a day: For I do not want or hope for any other joy / Except your sweet dominion. And I do confess, I have risen high, / Thinking I am requited with love from you, to whom I am faithful and humbled. / Whoever makes you believe or think otherwise Is disloyal, thief, and traitor, / Who wants to disturb our joy.]

So disconnected does this response appear from La Nina’s sonnet that only a few abstract images connect it at all to its partner in the tenzone: the phrases “tapino” (3) and “alti salito” (9). If La Nina’s representation of the male beloved casts him as a nonhuman creature, the male speaker’s representation of the female beloved denies her a body altogether, reducing her identity into a “vis” “clero” (1; clear visage). His presumption of her transparent disposition only heightens his opacity. The last stanza of the octave mirrors in an especially deflective manner the female speaker’s concern about betrayal. Using elusive language, the male speaker does not deny the female speaker’s accusations about his wandering. Rather, he uses the subjunctive mood and other conjectural grammatic tactics in his evasive answer. Where La Nina’s speaker declares in the indicative mood that “un’altra donna lo tene in balia” (8; another woman has [the sparrowhawk] at her mercy), the male speaker in the response-sonnet retorts in a series of hypothetical negatives that “altra gioia non volglio né spero / se no la vostra gaia sengnoria” (7–8; [he] neither wants 14. “Vis’ amoros’, angelico e clero,” fol. 158v, V798. I have consulted the Contini edition for the transcription but have followed the orthography of the Canzoniere Vaticano (MS. Vat. Lat. 3793). My translation. As with the call-sonnet, I have combined lines of the response-sonnet according to the mise-en-page of the manuscript folio.

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nor hopes for any other joy / if not [her] sweet dominion). Finally, the sestet of the response-sonnet helpfully demonstrates a dismissive and blunt conclusion in contrast to the introspective and nuanced sestet of the call-­sonnet. In his evocation of an outside rumormonger who is “disleale, larone e traito” (13; disloyal, thief and traitor), the response-sonnet follows the convention of troubadours like Bertran de Born, whose own falconry-training love comparison is followed by an accusation against “fals enveios fementit lausengier” (6.49; false, envious, lying backbiters).15 Where La Nina Siciliana’s sestet demonstrates control over her feeling of wretchedness in the form of memorymastery, the response-sonnet relies on a self-aggrandizing ironic confession and conventional evocation of traitorous rumor, implying the fault lies with the lady’s naiveté and gullibility. La Nina Siciliana’s sonnet thus registers on two levels: within the constraints of the tenzone, she is speaking to the male beloved who summarily dismisses her fears as easily as he dismisses her metaphor. But the nuance of her metaphor conveys her own poetic identity on another level, independent of the love narrative. Poetry at this historical moment was poised to invite this kind of self-reflexivity: unlike the French troubadour tradition, Italian vernacular poetry was “part of a written tradition, independent of music, from the start.”16 In breaking from “the symbiosis between poetry and music in troubadour lyric,” Olivia Holmes argues, Italian lyric “inevitably created a fictional narrator, the real author’s alter ego, who was able to lead an existence more independent from its creator or performer than it had in a performance 17 situation.” By resetting the default to female in the form of the sonnet and in the sex of the handler and bird, the sonnet’s speaker uses the subtlety of hawk female dominance to balance a love-loss narrative of absence with a strong assertion of identity and poetic presence. My reading of the sonnet focuses on the connection between speaker and poem, a connection that the falconry conceit sets up through the relationship between hawk and handler, a relationship familiar to its direct audience, the poets of the Sicilian School, and its wider audience, men and women educated in falconry. It does something that other falconry allegories don’t do by mirroring release with self-assertion, using specific shapes and sounds to demonstrate how the speaker has recovered an identity in the form of the poem. The shape of the poem itself recalls the difference in size between the sexes, and this difference helps reset the default outlook to dominant female. 15. Bertran de Born, “Eu m’escondisc, dompna, que mal non mier.” This poem appears in Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born, ed. Paden, Sankovitch, and Stäblein. 16. Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self, 12. 17. Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self, 4.

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The first line of the poem and octave, “Tapina in me” (1; Wretched me), establishes a link between the larger octave and the female speaker (“me”) as subject, while the first line of the smaller sestet evokes “Isparvero mio” (9; my own sparrowhawk) as the subject. The poem is also neatly divided into two addresses: the octave, which contains a summary of the narrative (I had a sparrowhawk, then I lost the bird to another lady), addresses a presumed audience who is not the beloved (i.e., the reader). The sestet addresses the beloved and evokes specific memories of their connection through the falconry conceit. By the sestet, though she addresses the lover, the speaker has also successfully adopted the lover’s perspective, which has become part of her poetic voice. This interspecies symbiosis constitutes falconry training, but the sonnet troubles a gendered view of this symbiosis with its female speaker, female hawk, and presumably male human beloved. While the sonnet’s shape suggests an unequal relationship between the sexes (the larger octave representing a female speaker and the smaller sestet invoking the presumed male beloved directly), the sonnet’s rhyme scheme takes the shape of the balanced interspecies relationship between female speaker and female hawk. The rima alternata (alternating rhyme) creates a switchback movement that mirrors the human falconer casting off and recovering a hawk. The tenses shift in a similar movement: in the second stanza, the beloved’s distance, “Or è montato” (5; Now it has mounted [flown high]), is described in present tense, but the tenses move backwards in time as the poem advances forward in structure. In the third stanza, the speaker uses past tense to evoke their former closeness: (“t’avea nodrito” [9; I had nourished you]). These shifts resemble the return flight path of a hawk, creating the feeling of a recovery even as the words describe a desertion. In the second stanza’s description of the actual desertion, the speaker removes herself from the narrative, cordoning off the external loss of control from the rest of the poem’s first-person mode. The sonnet uses that distance to mirror the release and ascent of the hawk in the entire poem, and in miniature within this stanza: Or è montato e salito sì altero Assai più alto che far non solia; Ed è asiso dentro d’uno verzero, Un’altra donna lo tene in balìa. (5–8)

In lines that parallel the flight of the sparrowhawk, she describes first the ascent (“è montato e salito” [it has mounted and risen]), then apex (“assai più

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alto” [much higher]), then descent (“è asiso” [it is seated]), and finally desertion (“un’altra donna lo tene in balìa” [another woman has it at her mercy]). Here, the hawk’s flight represents the lover’s absence, longer than any he has previously exhibited. The orchard then becomes the locus amoenus, the body of another lady, so that by the final line of the octave, there is no question about what it means for another woman to have the “hawk” at her mercy (“in balìa”). By separating herself from the action of desertion in this stanza, though, La Nina Siciliana uses poetic form to create the sensation of watching a hawk fly away, leaving space in the sonnet’s conclusion for something else to fill that void. The concluding sestet is the poem’s offering of an alternative to desertion because it externalizes the speaker’s memory, substituting recovery of self in place of a recovery of the male beloved. The speaker begins the sestet with the exclamation “Isparvero mio,” using the possessive “mio” (my) to bring herself back into the poem and connect that self to the female sparrowhawk. But in the second half of the sestet’s opening line, she focuses on her own investment in and symbiosis with the bird. Here she parallels the first stanza’s “ch’io me ne moria” (2; that I would die over it) with “ch’io t’avea nodrito” (9; that I had nourished you), reminding the reader of the deathlike loss she felt and the cause of that feeling: she nourished the hawk herself. The sonnet moves backwards in time and into the speaker’s memory to describe the connection formed through falconry training: the nourishment she gave it (9), the golden bells she had it wear (10), and the jesses now broken (13). Her connection to the hawk required her to enter into its perspective, losing a little of herself in the process. These lines specifically evoke phrases in falconry training that join the falconer with her bird. Imagining what it would take for the bird’s “uccellar” (14; hawking) to become “più ardito” (11; more ardent) required her to alter her own identity to accommodate both of theirs. Phases of training described in Frederick’s treatise De arte venandi cum avibus demonstrate how the falconer invests so much of herself in her hawk while training it that there occurs a symbiosis between the two, which we see lyricized in “Tapina in me.” Through common deprivations in the training process, shared by falconer and hawk, the bird and human impress upon one another. Handling a hawk requires that the falconer adjust her body to accommodate the bird as if it were a part of her own body, a part to which she must remain constantly sensitive. This hypersensitivity to external factors (such as wind) and internal factors (such as the micro-movements of the falconer’s body) render the hawk an extension of the falconer, both physiologically and psychologically. To illustrate this point, I turn to Frederick’s meticulous expla-

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nation of “De modo standi super manum” (328.10; How to Carry a Falcon on the Hand).18 While many other treatises also mention that the falconer must carry the bird for an uninterrupted length of time, they take for granted the details about how much the hand, arm, body, and breath of the falconer must change to become a perch for the bird. For example, John Trevisa’s translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus paints a common picture of the bird-to-hand bond between hawk and falconer: “And þey beþ iloved of hire lordes and ibore on hondes and isette on perchis and istroked in þe brest and in þe taile and imade playne and smothe, and þey beþ inorischid wiþ grete besynesse and diligence.”19 (And [hawks] are loved by their lords and borne on [their] hands and set on perches and stroked on the breast and tail and made plain and smooth, and they are nourished with great exertion and diligence.) Adelard of Bath advises that “frequente[r] manus sinistra movenda est, ut sedere discat” (the left hand must be moved about often, so that [the hawk] learns to sit).20 Albertus Magnus, whose text appears appended to the Vatican MS of Frederick’s treatise, writes: Primum autem regimen perficitur, si nunquam nisi super manum cibetur, quia ex hoc manum consuescet et diliget, ex beneficio inclinante animum ipsius. [. . .] Primo autem quando domesticandus est, ab ante lucem [. . .] teneatur in manu usque ad tertiam [. . .] et demum resumatur ad manum, et 21 teneatur in manu usque ad primum sonum. [The first step in training is accomplished if [the hawk] is never fed unless on the hand, because through this, [the hawk] becomes accustomed to and chooses [to perch on] the hand, and from this benefit [the hawk] bends its will [to the falconer]. [. . .] And during the first training phrases, before dawn [. . .] [the hawk] is held on the hand until the third hour of the day [. . .] and eventually returned to the hand and held on the hand until bedtime.]

While these other texts do allude to the importance of training to the fist, through a combination of nourishment, habit, and human contact, they do not go into detail describing the lengths to which human handlers must alter their bodies to facilitate this training. Albertus Magnus repeats the directive 18. Citations to the Budriesi edition of Frederick II, De arte venandi cum avibus, occur parenthetically in text by page and line number. Translations are my own. 19. Trevisa, On the Property of Things, ed. Seymour, 609. 20. Adelard of Bath, Adelard of Bath, Conversations with His Nephew, trans. and ed. Burnett, 246–47. 21. Albertus Magnus, De falconibus, asturibus, accipitribus, 382–83. My translation.

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to keep the hawk “super” “in” or “ad” “manum” but does little to suggest that the human attached to that hand endures discomfort or anything like the “inclinante” (bending) of the will experienced by the hawk. In contrast, it is Frederick who “emphasizes more than his predecessors the need for man to adapt to animal.”22 According to Frederick’s treatise, the first phase of manning initiates a change in the falconer’s body, illustrating how the human must adapt to accommodate the bird. The following lengthy description of the slight alterations of the arm suggests that the arm becomes an autonomous appendage, separating it from the movements and vibrations of the rest of the falconer’s body to become something new, a host for the falcon: Teneat igitur partem brachii, que est ab humero usque ad cubitum, que dicitur armus, descendente[m] recte iuxta latus, non tamen cum iunctura lateri, nam si coniungeretur ei, movendo corpus suum, moveret et brachium, quo modo inquietaret avem. Reliquam vero partem brachii, que est a cubito versus manum, replicet ad anteriorem partem corporis, ut ex replicatione huius partis brachii et superioris fiat angulus rectus. Manum vero, que [est] a brachio usque ad extremitatem digitorum, non plicet interius neque exterius, set in rectitudine brachit teneat, coniungendo pollicem extensum indici, et replicet indicem ad extremitatem pollicis, et erit modus secundum quem abaciste tenent septuaginta cum manu. Et alii eiusdem manus digiti replicentur in palmam sub illis duobus digitus, ut firmius sustente[n]tur, ad similitudinem tenentis numerum trinarium, et sic ex replicatione indicis super pollicem et trium digitorum in palma sub illis teneatur manus ad formam abaciste tenentis septuaginta tria, et hec forma convenientior [est] sustentandi avem super manum. (328.13–330.1) [Let, therefore, the part of the arm that is from the shoulder to the elbow, which is called the upper arm, drop vertically next to the side, but not brought together with the side, for if they were to come together, moving one’s own body would also move one’s arm, in a way which would disturb the bird. Then let the part of the arm that is from the elbow to the hand bend toward the front part of the body, so that the bending of this part of the arm is formed at a right angle to the upper part. However, do not let the hand, from the forearm to the tips of the fingers, bend either inward nor outward, but hold the arm straight, bringing together the extended thumb and fore 22. Strubel and Saulnier, La poétique de la chasse au Moyen âge, 34. Translated from the French: “Frédéric souligne plus que ses prédécesseurs la nécessité pour l’homme de š’adapter à l’animal.”

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finger, and bend the forefinger to the tip of the thumb, according to the way that monks make the abacus sign of seventy with their hand. And let the other fingers of the same hand be folded on the palm under those two fingers, so that they are held firm, according to the likeness of a signed number three, and so from the bending of the forefinger above the thumb and the three fingers on the palm under those, let the hand be held according to the form of an abacus sign for seventy-three, and this form is appropriate for carrying a bird on the hand.]

In a sense, the falconer gives up her own arm while it is still attached to her body. The long, arduous description of what seems a simple enough concept also works to disassociate what the arm used to be (a part of the falconer’s body) from its new identity as a perch for the hawk. The passage’s repeated uses of qualifying conjunctions like “que dicitur,” “que est,” “tamen,” and “vero” take the reader farther and farther from a previous notion of her “bracchium,” and even mirror on a small scale an alteration of her prior human identity. As sensitive as an exposed nerve, the hawk is under constant observation and care while on the fist, and, while the falconer carries it, she must bend her mind and body to consider its every perception and need. The looseness of the upper arm and the right angle of the lower arm create a muscular tension that must be carefully balanced and held so for hours at a time. In this way, the falconer alters her own body such that she turns her arm into an extension of the hawk, and the hawk an extension of herself.

SIGILLOGRAPHIC IMAGERY The literary image of human handler connected to avian partner constitutes Frederick’s treatise and La Nina Siciliana’s sonnet, but by the mid-thirteenth century it was also circulating visually in sigillographic iconography. Seals depicting a female falconer with hawk on hand present a visual for this alternative way to consider falconry and women together: hawks mirror a woman thinking about her own position in relation to control and the body. An important means of establishing identity in the High Middle Ages, sealing a document involved leaving a wax impression with a seal matrix, a round or oval metal stamp bearing the reverse image of the personal insignia and name of its owner. By the thirteenth century, aristocratic and non-noble women were using seals to assert their authority and identity on personal and domestic documents. Brigitte Bedos-Rezak writes that seal users “came to develop

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an awareness of [their] social and personal identity” in relation to their seals. 23 At the height of sealing’s popularity in the thirteenth century, many women’s seals featured women practicing falconry.24 By the second half of the thirteenth century, the most common topos for women’s seals was a lady fitted in hunting robes, on horseback or standing, with a hawk on her glove (figs. 2.2 and 2.3). In her study of French seals dating from 1250 to 1300, Bedos-Rezak concludes that the widespread image of female falconers on seals expresses “the crisis within the medieval experience of power” because images of hawks and women together stir “that male anxiety which stems from the perception 25 of incomplete mastery over the surrounding world.” Richard Almond, too, argues that seal authority, “derived from marriage,” “together with the symbol of an exclusive pastime denoting female empowerment” render paradoxical 26 the image of the female falconer on seals. Even as they acknowledge that the symbols denote female falconers, these readings nevertheless assume an interpretational binary: man as falconer trains woman as hawk. This binary does not account for the historical fact that women also practiced falconry and thus must have surely approached images of female falconers from a different perspective, though the static image on seals seems to obstruct dynamic understanding of that perspective. When we follow the static image into poetic narrative, however, we see that the female falconer does even more than “symbolize the limits of social power.”27 Rather than conveying an anxiety about the “conflict between the opposing forces of culture and nature,”28 images of female falconers explicitly foreground uncertain control in falconry because the women holding the birds share the hawk’s position in their own cultural framework. These images collapse the distinction between the object being controlled and the subject controlling it. In falconry the ultimate loss of control manifests when the hawk never returns, when it has deserted the falconer. The seals bring woman and hawk together to emblematize the symbolic connection between the two, and the sonnet gives that connection a narrative by illustrating how the woman still bears the marks of her relationship with the bird even when the bird is not there. 23. Bedos-Rezak, When Ego Was Imago, 112. 24. Bedos-Rezak, “Women, Seals, and Power,” 64. 25. Bedos-Rezak, “Women, Seals, and Power,” 77. 26. Almond, Medieval Hunting, 161. 27. Bedos-Rezak, “Women, Seals, and Power,” 77. 28. Bedos-Rezak, “Women, Seals, and Power,” 77.

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FIGURE 2. 2. French copper alloy seal matrix of Elizabeth, Lady of Sevorc. © Trustees of the British Museum.

The examples in this chapter build on the paradox of control and release that we saw in chapter 1’s falconry treatise. The difference is in how a specifically female falconer deals with release. The image of female falconer begins from a place of loss, positing falconry’s brand of desertion as an interpretive tool with which to approach poetry. Considering the diffusion of falconry among women, and falconry as a common feature on women’s seals, the sonnet does not so much subvert gender roles as show what poetic creation and falconry share when the bird is not there. Women choosing to picture themselves holding their own bird, in seals and in this sonnet, employ a signification system that is simultaneously used to regulate them. But La Nina’s particular lyric, written from the perspective of a female speaker, is equally about the unmaking of a convention and the creation of an alternative hermeneutic with which to approach tropes that appear to subordinate female

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FIGURE 2. 3. Italian bronze seal matrix of Mas, wife of Antonio D’Lendaria. © Trustees of the British Museum.

subjects. Rather than dismiss the trope of falconry and replace it with another, this poem and the seals demonstrate a self-governance from a place of subordination. In this case, desertion becomes an opportunity to reflect on the instability of control in the first place. By choosing an image of a lady with hawk on hand as their marker of identity, women are doing more than showcasing their complete courtly education. They are reclaiming a symbol that had been associated with their own subjugation, and they are altering their relationship to that symbol. The historical fact that women practiced falconry allowed hawks in seal iconography to register on multiple levels: these seals depict something that women actually did, and they remind viewers that the falconry as metaphor for female domestication is counteracted by the fact that the lady is in possession of her bird. Extant examples of seals with female falconers offer two configurations: a woman on horseback with hawk on glove, presumably on the hunt with her bird (fig. 2.2), and a woman standing with hawk on glove, at leisure with her bird, training it to the fist but not actively flying it (fig. 2.3). In either case, these seals allow their users to identify with the bird as well as with the falconer. The human woman on the seal is the most obvious proxy for the lady whose name the seal bears. But her close contact with the bird—it is always on the glove, connected to the woman’s hand—suggests intersubjectivity between the two. This interconnectedness is truly a part of falconry training because of the constant contact between falconer and hawk, but on the seal, it is doing something specifically self-reflexive because of the literary precedent of associating women with hawks.

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Both seals suggest a level of self-control because they capture a moment in which the falconer has not yet released her bird. Seals depicting women with a hawk on the fist could very well symbolize women controlling their bodies and how their bodies are interpreted. The images of standing ladies with hawks on the glove, especially, support such a closed circuit of control beginning and ending with the woman’s own body. She alone holds the bird, and she is immobile and fixed in time. But if the seal images encapsulate this moment in falconry training that conveys control, they also anticipate their antithesis: the moment the falcon flies from the glove. The equestrian image offers a slightly different take on control from the standing falconer because it depicts a horse-woman-hawk triad in motion. Lady Elizabeth de Sevorc’s seal depicts her horse in such a flurry of movement that three of its legs burst through the inner circle and invade the inscription-space of the outer border (fig. 2.2). One hind leg of the horse is so extended that the hoof nearly breaks through the outer border of the seal’s inscription. The motion of the horse pushes the confines of the seal’s inner frame, suggesting that soon the hawk, too, will be released from the lady’s glove, disappearing from within the seal’s frame and the lady’s view. This seal contains another element that distinguishes it from all other extant examples of equestrian hawking women on seals: what Frederick’s treatise calls the tiratoria, or tiring, a meaty bird leg used to entice the hawk to return to the falconer if it flees. Frederick describes when and how to use the tiring in language that resembles the scene portrayed on Lady Elizabeth’s seal: “Falconarius itaque habeat semper tiratorium in manu in qua non portat falconem, vel secum in carneria sua aut in alio loco a quo possit haberi cito, et non ostendat tiratorium falconi, nisi quotiens viderit esse opus.” (422.2–5; So let the falconer always hold the tiring in the hand that is not carrying the falcon, or in the meat-pouch, or in another place that will allow it to be gotten quickly, and let [the falconer] not show the tiring to the falcon, except for when [the falconer] sees it is needed.) The tiring that she holds in one hand evokes the looming fear and eventual reality of release, even as her other hand grasps the jesses and leash tethered to the falcon. These examples of women’s seals are more than coincidental cases of individual identity crafting; they point to a pattern of self-reflection. “Ultimately,” Bedos-Rezak writes, “female seals carry the abstracted image of woman rather than portraying individual persons. These seals are stereotypes, semiotic conventions of a collective mentality.”29 What is this “collective mentality” to which seal iconography grants access? Bedos-Rezak claims that such iconography shows us “the place which [women] occupied [.  .  .] with reference to 29. Bedos-Rezak, “Women, Seals, and Power,” 75.

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their own psychic and emotional environment,”30 but few scholars go further than hazarding that the female falconer on seals mediates “ambiguous meanings associated with birds of prey.”31 We can do a great deal of speculating about what the image of female falconers symbolized for the women who commissioned these seals. We can speculate that there was certainly a bit of irony in choosing an image that had also been used to denigrate women, as in John of Salisbury’s observation from the Policraticus: “Quod deterior sexus in auium uenatione potior est. In quo poteras naturam arguere, nisi nosses quia 32 deteriora semper proniora sunt ad rapinam.” (The inferior sex is superior in the hunting of birds. In this, you could accuse nature, unless you knew that inferior things are always more prone to rapine.) The work of art historians has helped us ascertain the prevalence of this image, and their arguments about the wide range of falconry’s symbolism are in line with other iterations of women and hawk in art (see for example, fig. 5.3, an ivory mirror valve discussed in chapter 5). But to fully understand the dynamic of the image and what it illustrates in a “collective mentality,” we can turn to a poetic mode of representation that continues the story of a woman with her bird. Once we imagine the woman on Lady Elizabeth’s seal actually engaging in falconry, we set the horse in motion and see her releasing that bird from the glove. La Nina’s sonnet offers one potential narrative that takes place after the bird takes off. The poem thus allows us to move beyond interpreting the symbolism of the seals as finally ambiguous—it puts the images on the seals into a narrative about how release of the hawk enables self-assertion. Before returning to the sonnet, I cite a particularly arresting passage from De arte venandi cum avibus that demonstrates the symbiosis between handler and bird. This passage admonishes the falconer for presuming a congenial familiarity on the part of the bird, declaring that the bird’s supposed comfort with the human comes down to hunger alone. The tone of the passage nevertheless seems to betray an empathetic connection between the author and the birds he describes, even demonstrating intersubjectivity felt by the falconer. Frederick warns: Nam quod detineantur ab homine, quod habeant iacticios laqueos in pedibus, quod stent ligati in sede sua, quod pascantur super manum hominis, quod cum homine stent, quod volentes recedere, ut earum moris est, de sede sua, prohibeantur recedere, quod teneant canpanellam aut capellum, quod, postquam iam dimissi sunt, liberati et sui iuris, ad hominem redeant, quod 30. Bedos-Rezak, “Women, Seals, and Power,” 73. 31. Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power, 130. 32. John of Salisbury, Policratici, 25. My translation.

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hominem vadentem ad ipsas expectent, quod clausi detineantur in domibus, hec omnia contraria sunt nature sue. Proinde restat solum per gustum assuefacere ipsas ad videndum, tangendum et audiendum hominem, cetera que conversantur cum homine, et ad omnia modo dicta. (358.27–360.5) [For the fact [is] that they [hawks] are detained by humans; that they have entangling jesses on their feet; that they remain tied to their perch; that they eat on the human hand; that they remain with humans; that wanting to flee from their perch, as is their custom, they are prohibited from fleeing; that they wear their bells or hood; that, once they are released, freed, and in command of themselves, they return to humans; that they wait for a human rushing towards them; that they are closed up in the mews; all of these things are against their nature. So then it remains only through taste they accustom themselves to seeing, touching, and hearing humans, and all the other things that are associated with humans, and [doing] all the things 33 just said.]

The anaphoric structure mirrors the training it describes. The repetition of “homine” and unrelenting subjunctive quod clauses burden the eye as they repeat, foreclosing an escape from the passage’s crescendo in the same way that the corresponding description of training and deprivation of freedom burdens the falcons into submission by habit and habitual proximity to “homines.” Yet the very fact that the lines require the reader to view the world through the perception of the hawk conveys that something besides either subordination or sameness is happening. The perception is not a substitutive point of view but an extended one. The hawk is “detained by humans,” “on the human hand,” and “with humans.” The hawk is tied to a perch by jesses and a leash, which the falconer holds, then tied to a creance when it first flies. The etymology of this word, creance, rooted in the concept of trust, externalizes the human mistrust of avian wild nature. The creance (credentia) is so called “quod in primis recessibus avis de manu portantis et in primis emissionibus eius ad loyrum, ex quibus avis docetur non fugere ab homine, non credit[ur] ipsi avi, quoniam ipsa, memorans suam agrestitatem, fugeret et libertatem potius eligeret quam super loyrum sedere, set creditur illi filerie que credentia dici potest” (588.21–26; because in the bird’s first retreats from the carrying hand and in its first flights to the lure, by which the bird is taught not to flee from [the falconers], they do not trust the bird, because [the bird], remem 33. Here, as throughout, I translate “homo, hominis” in a way that does not encourage a patriarchal default and assumption about males training females.

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bering its wild state, would rather flee and choose freedom than be settled on the lure, but they trust those lines, which can be called the “creance”). The material quality of this human trust in the creance must be replaced by an immaterial trust between both species. When the bird is released “sui iuris” (in command of itself), an invisible cord of dependency tethers the flying bird to the human below “rushing towards [it].” The cord is composed “solum per gustum” (only through taste), through the habitual eating from human hand. In this way, hawk becomes dependent on falconer, and falconer an extension of hawk insofar as she provides it nourishment. What these passages from De arte venandi cum avibus demonstrate is the degree to which the falconer moves through the world with the hawk an extension of herself, literally on the glove, and psychologically in her worrying about the strength of the invisible cord binding the two. This tenet of falconry training, that the hawk and falconer exist as extensions of one another, helps us make sense of the seal image of female falconers pictured together with their hawks. When this formulation is applied to a love relationship in a metaphor where a man is a falconer and a woman is his hawk, the result is a lamentation of the investment the man has put into training his bird and what a loss of time and resources it is when the bird deserts him. But in the case of the sonnet, where the woman is the falconer and the man is the bird, the result is something more like the actual practice of falconry as described by Frederick’s treatise. In the sonnet, what the woman has to give up (her body) to keep her lover is indeed a part of herself she can’t get back. But it’s not as simple as a mere reversal of the roles, since both the female noun sparvero and the seal iconography align the hawk with the woman’s body. The narrative about the relationship between woman and bird, read in light of the treatise passages, demonstrates how the poet and her poem mirror one another in the same way that the falconer’s body must change to accommodate her bird. The sonnet then seems to use the pretense of a love relationship to follow love-lyric convention, but the falconry narrative allows us to think about poetic creation and the connection between an author and her object. The seals help reinforce this connection, too, since they represent a woman holding a hawk on an object that constitutes her own identity.

AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE LOVE-LOSS NARRATIVE Returning to the sonnet again, this notion of human and hawk existing as extensions of one another enables a close reading that allows the speaker to release the male lover and recover a poetic identity. In each of its four stan-

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zas, La Nina’s sonnet uses the relationship between falconer and hawk to convey profound loss of love, and seemingly loss of self. La Nina ultimately uses release to her advantage, relying on the connection between hawk and falconer to posit that because she has been deserted, she might replace anxiety with self-assertion. She does this by constructing two personas: the abandoned lady and the present speaker. By inserting first-person pronouns at strategic moments describing past training, La Nina moves the focus from the beloved to her own past. Though this past is dominated by a falconry training that has resulted in the loss of her hawk, her present account of that training produces something to take the place of what was lost: the poem. The sonnet’s first two lines establish the connection between speaker and hawk, but the focus throughout is on what that connection has taken out of her: “Tapina in me ch’amava uno sparvero: / Amavalo tanto, ch’io me ne moria” (1–2; Wretched me, who loved a sparrowhawk: I loved it so much that I would die over it). The first line twice establishes the speaker as the subject of the line: “tapina in me” (wretched me) “ch’amava uno sparvero” (who loved a sparrowhawk). Her toggle between speaking of herself in the first person (me) and narrating about herself in the third person (who loved) demonstrates the beginning of a separation between self-as-speaker and self-as-lover that the following lines develop. She loved him (“amavalo,” again using the third person to describe herself) so much that she was dying over it: “ch’io me ne moria.” The redundancy of the first-person pronoun “io” (English pronoun “I”), which, in the Italian language, is not grammatically necessary for the sense or metrically necessary for the hendecasyllabic lines, establishes a retrieval of self in place of retrieval of the beloved. The structure of sound within the poem continues to perform the activity of self-assertion. The Italian long “i” sound (English: ee) so permeates each stanza of this sonnet that the entire poem is infused with the sound of the first-person subject “io” (pronounced ee-o, with emphasis on the ee). The B and C rhymes all place stress on the “i” sound: moria, dovia, solia, balia, nodrito, ardito, and fugito (2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13). This sound most heavily dominates the sonnet, not only constituting half of its end-rhymes but also resounding as the most frequently stressed vowel sound within its fourteen lines: tapina, io, salito, asiso, mio, io, ti, salito, si, li (1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 9, 10, 12, 13). This dominating i creates a wailing lamentation drawn out throughout the poem, an auditory effect that seems to complement the love narrative’s tragedy. But its sonorous and graphic identification with the first-person pronoun “io” also reminds the reader of the lamentation’s subject rather than the object that has been lost. The result is a slow recognition that the loss of the sparrowhawk resulted in the profit of something else, the “io” (I) that arose to

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author the sonnet. The repetitious “io” creates the sense that the poem and speaker are extensions of one another in the same way as the hawk and falconer undergo a kind of symbiosis. In the opening stanza, La Nina creates a connection between her poetspeaker and the suffering of her past self: the speaker compares the distorted degree of her love to a death in the imperfect tense (“moria”). This verb tense creates a separate world for her separate identity, inviting her readers to inhabit the poem’s own specific temporal space. The Italian imperfetto (imperfect tense) represents a past action that occurred or recurred over a stretch of time but without the finite decisiveness of the alternative past tense used in the poem, the passato prossimo (past perfect). The imperfect form of “morire” (to die) creates a temporal space separate from the literal past. She did not actually die, but how else, except through lamenting her sorrow in poetic form, could she create a time and place for what felt like death? The second line exemplifies this usage of the imperfect most stringently: “Amavalo tanto, ch’io me ne moria” (loved him so much that I would die over it). The succession of monosyllabic words and monotone sounds (“me ne”) builds up to the drawn-out sound of the three-syllable “mo-ri-a.” The “ne” is all but swallowed up by the surrounding “me” and “moria,” such that we also hear “memoria” at this critical juncture, drawing us further into the mind and memory of the speaker. In the final stanza, the speaker lets go entirely of the hawk but retains her poetic control over the memory of her love. The stanza begins with the formula of “Or” (now) + passato prossimo, evoking that ascending flight action, just as in the second stanza. But the stanza’s final line replaces action with a reflection on a state of mind: “Or se’ salito sì come lo mare, / Ed a’ rotti li gieti e se’ fugito / Quando eri fermo nel tuo ucellare” (13–14; Now you have risen so, like the sea, / And you’ve broken the jesses and you’ve escaped, / When once you were constant in your hawking). The first line introduces a metaphor that situates her lover not as a bird but as a memory that threatens to envelop her voice like a rising sea. The passato prossimo tense in the penultimate line, “a’ rotti li gieti e se’ fug[g]ito” (you’ve broken the jesses and you’ve escaped), completes the breaking action in the past, severing the cord between speaker and beloved. The image of the broken jesses registers within the poem and across the gendered falconry convention; the speaker breaks with the troubadour tradition of women “de bonz jetz apreiszonatz” (bound with good jesses).34 Within the poem, the broken cord between falconer and bird means that the speaker is left with something else, something new, a product of surplus: a self 34. Giraut de Bornelh, “No posc sofrir c’a’ la dolor,” XXXVII.20.

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that has been altered, taken to a place like death but not death, and left with an introspective voice that can remember a time when “eri fermo” (you were constant). The sestet expresses the memories of a time when the cord between the two was not broken, giving the speaker the last word, the last memory, and the enduring voice to turn that memory into poetry. That final turn in the last half of the sestet makes visible La Nina’s specific form of control: she has caused the reader to become lost in her memory. Her release of the hawk, and its breaking of the jesses, has made possible a new control, that over her poetic representation of the past. Let us read the speaker’s suffering not as inflicted by the loss of a literal beloved but rather as a lyric voice speaking from an apparent position of subordination. The female speaker bypasses the male lover in the narrative to communicate to the audience precisely about the unreliability of the signification system from which her poem draws. Frederician scholar Daniela Boccassini posits that the falconry-love analogy shows how “the components of training, of arte, are implicit in falconry, love, and poeticizing.” But this analogy would not be possible without the aesthetic work of falconry training, which requires participants to “enter into a dynamic circle that is destined to produce substantial interior transformations in at least one of the participants, and which, for this very reason, entails a corresponding transformation in all those who are involved in the process.”35 The narrative of release allows us to read the sonnet in the context of this transformative poem-poet-reader relationship that surrounding lyrics in the Canzoniere also take up. But the voice and form of the sonnet demote human signification systems and ask us to consider not how hawks are like us but how women might draw power from looking to the raptorial world as an alternative to their human hierarchy, creating an imaginative space that lives alongside memory and poetry. By separating the bird from its falconer, the sonnet conveys an acceptance of loss, as if to say, as I lose control over you, watching you desert me, I create a space of my own, within me. One might say that such a space is neatly separate from reality and therefore poses no threat to the human patriarchy, but the very existence of this sonnet, the multiplication of its dimorphic form across a thousand sonnets, is powerful. The poetic form of “Tapina in me” makes manifest on the page a gender hierarchy reimagined, redistributed, recoded so that a sonnet and its stanzaic form reset the default 35. Boccassini, Il volo della mente, 256. Translated from the Italian: “le componenti di addestramento, di arte, [sono] implicite in [falconaria, amare, cantare/poetare]. Si tratta di entrare nel circolo di una dinamica che è destinata a produrre metamorfosi interiori sostanziali in uno almeno dei partecipanti, e che proprio per questo comporta una corrispondente trasformazione in tutti coloro che in questo processo sono coinvolti.”

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to not male and not human and not quite avian, making visible the uncertain control between human and bird, lover and beloved, poet and poem. The tension between control and release is made even more apparent by the formal constraints of the sonnet. Though she appears to have lost control because she has released her lover, the speaker of this poem demonstrates precise lyric control. As Karla Mallette notes of a similar genre in the feminine voice, the mal-maritata poems in which a female speaker laments her unhappy marriage, a “controlled style mitigates the lady’s claims of [. . .] lack of control.”36 These poems “contras[t] exterior powerlessness and interior empowerment” which is exteriorized through the act of composing the lyric.37 Within the constraints of a fourteen-line dimorphic rhyming structure, the bereft speaker in our sonnet conveys both the profundity of loss and the freedom of release. For the mal-maritata, the unhappily married woman, falconry as a narrative trope provides both literal and symbolic escape, as we shall see in Marie de France’s Yonec. But the structural constraints of the sonnet model in microcosm the aesthetic consequences of containment within longer narrative poems and the manuscripts that house them, the subject of the next chapter.

36. Mallette, Kingdom of Sicily, 86. 37. Mallette, Kingdom of Sicily, 87–88.

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

The first two chapters of this book identified the Frederician court of the thirteenth century as a cultural touchstone for falconry’s elevation to an art and a literary trope. Frederick II’s hawking treatise, examined in chapter 1, privileged the female of the species in its elaborate textual rendering of the practice, and in chapter 2, we saw how a contemporary poet in Frederick’s milieu sonnetized the figure of the hawking woman to explicitly connect love, poetic voice, and falconry. This chapter builds on the poetics of practice and the gender reconfiguration from the first two chapters to examine a single manuscript containing a hawking treatise adjacent to a collection of poems featuring women. Marie de France’s lais feature female protagonists with often fantastical relationships to the flora and fauna, and especially to avian creatures, of their literary worlds. In particular, the lai Yonec features a mal-mariée who prays for a miraculous lover to enter the tower in which her jealous husband has enclosed her. The answer to her prayer enters through the window in the form of a falconry bird whose human avatar is a male knight. Despite the hawk-to-man transformation, this lai, like La Nina’s sonnet, also disrupts gendered borders: in addition to the fact that the bird’s designation as a goshawk (Anglo-Norman ostur) denotes the female of the species, the knight and the lady appear to share a female body at one point. This absorption, a condens-

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ing of multiple identities into one form, is also helpful in understanding the relationship of this lai to MS Harley 978, the manuscript miscellany in which it is housed. I use the term miscellany to indicate a manuscript whose contents may seem unrelated but which nevertheless may have been compiled with some guiding principle in mind. In this sense, I follow John Scahill’s qualification of a miscellany as guided by a “cohesion of some kind, which may either be external—directed towards some function—or internal, in which the relationship of texts with each other and the shaping of the whole are factors.”1 MS Harley 978 is a trilingual miscellany that is best known for housing the unique copy of the oldest Middle English lyric, “Sumer is icumen in,” as well as the most complete collection of Marie’s lais and a partial collection of Esope.2 Andrew Taylor argues that the manuscript “is indeed a single thirteenthcentury book” reflective of “the reading habits of a single thirteenth-century individual” rather than “a casual hodgepodge or the product of the tastes of a later antiquarian assembling disparate medieval materials.”3 The texts within the manuscript were brought together between 1261 and 1265 and copied by three to four scribes.4 Taylor speculates that this “unified volume” could even be “a good example of an important development in the book trade, the commercial production of portable and highly personalized miscellanies for an expanding market that now included lay people as well as clerics.”5 In suggesting that medieval readers interpreted Harley 978’s texts in conversation with one another, I am engaging in a broader contemporary critical conversation about the relationship between formal interpretations of literature and historical manuscript compilation. “Compilations,” Arthur Bahr writes, “compel texts to change their meanings in ways that a purely linear historicity cannot fully recover or anticipate, as a particular text’s relation to its broader codicological forms makes us rethink or resee something that by itself might seem 6 straightforward, uninteresting, or overfamiliar.”

1. Scahill, “Triligualism in Early Middle English Miscellanies,” 18. 2. The Marie of the Lais is not necessarily the same Marie who authored the Esope. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne builds on the philological work of Ian Short to urge scholars to “choose to work with the possibility of multiple Maries,” which would allow us to elucidate “a medieval literary landscape populated with the cultural authority and activity of women” (“Recovery and Loss,” 184). 3. Taylor, Textual Situations, 84; 89. 4. Taylor, Textual Situations, 85; 88. 5. Taylor, Textual Situations, 89; 94. 6. Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 5.

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An Anglo-Norman verse translation of Adelard of Bath’s De avibus tractatus, discussed in chapter 1, finds its way into MS Harley 978, sharing scribal hands with Marie’s Prologue to the Lais, separated only by the blank verso of a single folio. The apparent disparity between the hawking treatise and the neighboring lais proves, for Taylor, that miscellanies indicate “the bewildering complexity of human motives.”7 Bewildering though its textual arrangement might be for most modern readers centuries removed from the practice of falconry, MS Harley 978 offers material evidence for the integration of falconry concepts into medieval reading practice. The two-folio hawking treatise in Harley 978 is a perplexing poem that instructs its readers on the initial trapping and sheltering phases of falconry only and does not teach them how to go hunting with a bird, or even how to remove the bird from its cage. Instead, the treatise uses many of its 176 lines to explain the proper manner of enclosing, first in the hand and then in the cage, a captured hawk. The kind of enclosure this treatise proposes seems paradoxical: the physical space surrounding the bird must become smaller for the bird to progressively become bigger. This thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman verse translation of Adelard of Bath’s twelfth-century Latin prose dialogue remains faithful to the original in its explanation of this paradox of progressive diminishment. But unlike its source text, the Harley hawking treatise terminates before detailing what to do with a bird once it has grown strong within its enclosure. The fascicles and binding of the manuscript do not suggest that more of the treatise was meant to be included—its final lines reach the very edge of folio 117r, and Marie’s prologue begins on the next folio, 118r. The abrupt truncation of the hawking treatise in this miscellany raises questions about its utility for readers of Harley 978.8 However, when read in dialogue with Marie de France’s lais, the fragmentary treatise sets up this paradox of enclosure as a tool for interpreting representations of space in poetry. In fact, the manuscript itself acts as a space of enclosure that transforms how its readers encounter its contents; on their own, the lais or the hawking treatise might not appear to speak to one another. But the hawking treatise’s special attention to enclosure asks readers to pay attention to what happens when things are grouped together in small spaces.

7. Taylor, Textual Situations, 126. 8. Taylor has identified the same scribal hand for the hawking treatise and the beginning of Marie’s lais, precluding the possibility that the fragment is unfinished because of a change in hands.

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TO KEEP AND TO WATCH IN THE HARLEY HAWKING TREATISE, FOLS. 116V–117R Harley 978’s hawking treatise so alters the form of its source text, Adelard of Bath’s De Avibus Tractatus, that it bears little resemblance to a manual for hunting with birds.9 The anonymous Harley poet elected to change the original Latin to Anglo-Norman, prose to verse, and six folios to only a verso and recto across two folios, visible in their entirety when the manuscript lies open. The content of the Harley treatise covers the same initiatory material as Adelard’s text: the qualities of an austringer (trainer of hawks),10 the procedure for capturing an eyass or nestling, the preparation and method for feeding the captured hawk, and care for the hawk in the ferme, a housing structure for hawks known in English as a mews. Both this and Adelard’s treatise refer to an anterior source on falconry, King Harold’s or King Edward’s books, neither of which is extant but whose authoritative relevance I return to later in this section. The treatise terminates mid-thought as the nephew begins another query, presumably asking his uncle how to recognize when the hawk is strong enough to come out of its enclosure and begin flying as the hunting partner of its human handler.11 While the Harley hawking treatise retains the dialogic form of Adelard’s conversation between uncle and nephew, the poem’s rhymed couplets, repetition of puns, and dramatization of the fragility of the captured bird suggest a poetic intent. The hawking treatise offers a unique definition of enclosure through both the poem’s form and its content. The treatise uses the verb garder to conjure imagery of a retreat inward, into a diminishing space; at the same time, the verb sets up the anticipatory growth of the hawk, creating an outward expansion in the reader’s mind. Unlike the MS R Latin version of Adelard’s treatise, which the uncle-narrator himself begins, the Anglo-Norman poem follows 9. Adelard of Bath’s De Avibus Tractatus appears in six twelfth-century manuscripts, which can further be divided into two groups: three manuscripts of a long version and three of a short version. The long versions range in length from three to six folios. Additionally, the work was excerpted in various manuscripts in Latin, and adapted for use in Daude de Prada’s thirteenth-century Provencal Dels auzels cassadors (Burnett, “Introduction,” xxxvii–xlvii). 10. This treatise specifically treats the capture and training of short-winged hawks, ostur in Anglo-Norman. The treatise terminates before describing how to hunt with hawks, and its procedures for capturing and feeding hawks bear much resemblance to the initial phases of capturing and training falcons described by Frederick II in De arte venandi cum avibus, the treatise discussed at length in chapter 1. 11. I base this claim on Adelard of Bath’s dialogue, which treats the subject of strength after care for the hawk in the cage.

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MSS AW, which grant the first words to the inquisitive nephew, proposing the nephew’s use of garder as a framework for the entire poem. The nephew opens the dialogue specifically seeking to learn about how to garder, or keep, hawks: Pur ceo vodroie jo volenters Aprendre de ces ostrizers, De ceus la manere e les murs 12 Ke deivent garder les osturs (7–10) [For this reason [that hawks are fine possessions] I would willingly want / to learn about these austringers, / about the manner and the behaviors / of those who must keep goshawks.]

The verb garder here most likely signifies “keep” in the sense of “[looking] after (animals).”13 But garder’s definition also includes other actions relevant to hawking, including “to watch,” “to guard, detain, imprison,” “to protect, safeguard, save from harm,” “to hold in safe-keeping,” “to supervise, control,” “to 14 conserve, maintain, preserve,” and “to heed, pay attention to, think about.” The nephew’s opening inquiry sets up garder, then, as the primary concept for understanding the entirety of the treatise; the verb appears throughout the poem, drawing a parallel between the small enclosure for keeping a hawk and the limitless expanse of the imagination. In its opening, the treatise establishes reading as the key to transcending what enclosure seems to foreclose. Cary Howie’s Claustrophilia theorizes enclosure as reading practice and offers helpful language to think about how texts can enfold one another while still retaining their separateness: “To ‘enfold’ one thing within another [. . .] is not necessarily to reduce the enfolded to a bit, a portion, of what enfolds it”; rather, enclosure is a kind of “approximate reading [. . .], the bringing-close of distinct bodies and bodies of literature, which 15 thus appear to have always been touching.” To understand how the treatise constructs enclosure as a narrative mechanism, we first need to understand how the treatise itself uses garder to fold other artistic works and forms into its lines. In response to his nephew’s request to tell him anything he has heard (11; “oi”) about the manner and behavior of austringers, the narrator-uncle 12. Quotations of the Harley hawking treatise are taken from the Tilander transcription and cited in text by line number. Translations are my own. 13. Anglo-Norman Dictionary (hereafter AND), s.v. “garder” (v.a.3). 14. AND, s.v. “garder” (v.a.1–6). 15. Howie, Claustrophilia, 3; 145.

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responds that he will tell what he has found written in King Edward’s book “si cum jo lis e jo l’esgard” (15; just as I read and look at it).16 Though prompted to recount information he has gathered aurally, the uncle attributes his knowledge to a book, which he both reads (15; “lis”) and looks at (15; “esgard”). The rejection of Adelard’s attention to the “modernorum magistrorum usu” (238; practice of present-day masters) in deference to only written works shifts the focus from watching and doing to looking and reading.17 Additionally, naming his source encloses a book within a book: “el livere al bon rei Edward” (17; in the book of the good King Edward) within the lines of the Harley hawking treatise’s two folios. In this sense, the uncle’s response condenses the entirety of one book into two lines of poetry in a two-folio poem. Here the poet signals a relationship between the activities of reading and looking or, tending to the verb garder within esgarder, among reading, looking, and enclosing. These lines of poetry, and indeed these two verbs, suggest that reading is an activity that has the capacity to fold into a few words of poetry an entire tome, or even tomes, on falconry. Looking at the word garder in one line of poetry allows readers to unfold in their imagination what has been folded into the words of the poem and a sovereign’s (or sovereigns’) lost books. While the first section of the treatise establishes the condensing and expanding power of garder as an interpretive approach, the subsequent sections describe the physical enclosures that host the hawk. On a practical level, the poem’s repetition of the way the eyass should be carried reinforces the requisite care of such an endeavor, but formally the repetition of garder and prendre creates a series of concentric, diminishing enclosures within these lines of the poem: As nues meins les deit hum prendre Pur ço ke hum les put manier Plus suef e plus tard blescer. Mult les covient sués manier, Ki les voldrat aukes loinz porter. Pur ço que il sunt jofne e tendre, Covient il mult meuz garde prendre, Suef aler un petit pas, Kar al porter serrunt tost las. 16. My emphasis. Henceforth, all emphases can be considered added unless otherwise noted. 17. Quotations of De avibus tractatus are taken from the Burnett transcription of MSS AW and his facing-page translation and are cited by page number.

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Kaunt vuz reposerez, idunc Eiez de la fresche herbe ou junc Sur quei se pussent reposer, Ke suef les covient garder. (86–98) [One should take them barehanded / because in this way one can handle them / more gently and less easily harm [them]. / It is necessary to handle them very gently, / because [the austringer] will want to bring them fairly far. / Because they are young and fragile, / it is necessary to take a great deal of care, / to go gently and slowly, / because they will become tired from being carried. / When you will rest, then / have some fresh grass or reeds / on which they might rest, / for one must retain them gently.]

These lines of the dialogue’s third exchange detail removing an eyass from the eyrie with the utmost care. Hasty handling would damage the newly hatched eyass’s plumage, thereby impeding its subsequent development. Using bare hands to enclose the eyass, the uncle explains, enables the austringer to take (86; “prendre”) the newly hatched hawks “plus suef e plus tard blescer” (86– 88; more gently and less easily harm [them]). The text reiterates such gentle enclosure: “covient il mult meuz garde prendre” (92; it is necessary to take a great deal of care); “ke suef les covient garder” (98; one must retain them gently). The austringer removes the eyass from the eyrie “aukes loinz porter” (90; to bring [it] a little far) by a “petit pas” (93; small step). The increasingly minute quality of this movement’s descriptors (“aukes” and “petit”) seems to slow and diminish this movement until, a few lines later, the verb garder halts the motion altogether. The concept of progressive diminishment becomes clearer as enclosure takes on a more concrete and physical quality, yet this is not to say that it remains static as a space or a word. If garder illustrated a stopping of motion and a collapsing of action into a single locus, ferme (the hawk’s enclosure) is that destination, that “dynamic, shifting space.”18 Ferme’s grammatical versatility allows it to envelop both abstraction and concreteness of meaning. The eight-line description of the enclosure moves from using ferme as a noun, to a state of being, to a verb, and in doing so constructs enclosure as something that simultaneously is and does: 18. Chaganti, “Space of Epistemology,” 75. I use the concept “dynamic space” to help us understand the hawk’s “ferme” as a space that contains and facilitates movement. I am indebted to Seeta Chaganti’s illustration of this concept’s prevalence in medieval thought in her work on Yonec and return to the idea of “dynamic space” within the lai in the next section of this chapter.

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Une ferme lur covient fere E del junc ben junchir le eire, Pur la pluie covert de sus, E sulement un petit hus. En cele ferme demurrunt Ke il seient ferm, taunt i serrunt. E pur ço ferme le apelum Ke enfermi[r] leinz les lessum. (101–8) [It is necessary to make a mews (ferme) for them, / and cover the eyrie with reeds / for covering them from the rain, / and only a small door. / They will stay in this mews (ferme), / so that they be increased in plumage/loyalty (ferme), they will be there so long. / And for this reason we call it a “mews” (ferme), / because we leave them therein to grow strong/loyal (enfermir).]

Here, the repetition of ferme reiterates the image of enclosure as something concrete for the reader, despite its increasingly abstract grammatical usage. This word for the hawk’s enclosure is the same word, in adjectival form, for 19 describing a hawk that has increased feathers in size and number, and for 20 describing one who is loyal, “steadfast” and “unwavering.” In transitive verb form, fermer signified a range of specific actions that a subject could do to an object, but all the meanings share the image of fixing something in space: “to construct,” “to strengthen,” “to make concrete,” “to shut,” “to position,” and “to 21 enclose.” Though ferme as a mews is a physical place, it also signifies a state of being, of increasing in size, and, finally, it signifies the action specific to falconry of growing within a confined space. It is precisely the act of being enclosed that enables the bird to strengthen and recover from the ordeal of being captured in the first place, and in describing the bird’s physical enclosure, the treatise illustrates most lucidly the paradox of progressive diminishment. The treatise’s instructions on making the ferme conspicuously lack practical details on the procedure. What the treatise seems to communicate instead is the simultaneous diminishment and expansion this ferme offers, and it communicates this paradox precisely through its poetic form. The couplet that hinges on ferme’s switch from noun to adjective is where this structure’s potential to simultaneously collapse and allow expansion is most evident: “En cele ferme demurrunt / Ke il seient ferm, taunt i serrunt” (105–6; they will stay in this mews, / so that they be increased 19. Tilander, “Fragment d’un traite de fauconnerie anglo-normand en vers,” 40. 20. AND, s.v. “ferm” (a.1–6). 21. AND, s.v. “fermer” (v.a.1–6).

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in plumage/loyalty (ferme), they will be there so long). The first half of this couplet seems to affirm this diminishment as static: “en cele ferme demurrunt” (105; in this small mews they will stay). In fact, the verb demurer signifies an absolute stopping motion in many of its definitions, which include “to stay an action,” “to stop, stand still,” “to be preserved,” and even “to die.”22 But where the first half of the couplet suggested confinement, the second half describes an expansion dependent on being confined: “dumurrunt / ke il seient ferm, taunt i serrunt” (105–6; they will stay, / so that they be increased in plumage/ loyal (ferme), they will be there so long). In other words, the same word’s capacity to signify both an enclosure and a growing motion across the two lines of the couplet creates a hermeneutic model of progressive diminishment for use across the poem and the manuscript. The concluding section of the hawking treatise posits that while enclosure is necessary for the hawk to recover from the trauma of abduction, movement within the ferme is equally necessary for its growth, illustrating how expansion within enclosure might look in practice. It is this movement that allows the reader to imagine the ferme as a dynamic space rather than a static one: Quant vus affermer le verrez E perche li facez avoir Sur quei il se puisse assoir, De primes bas[e], pus hauçur, Si cum afforce sa vigur. (162–66) [When you will see it restored to strength, / you will give it a perch / on which it might alight, / initially a low one, then higher up, / as its vigor grows stronger.]

That the mews must accommodate both a low and a high perch, as well as the space for flying to these perches, expands its containing possibilities in the reader’s imagination. As the hawk’s “vigur” increases, in other words, as it transforms from weak to strong, its patterns of movement also change, and the composition of the enclosure’s inner space must change to accommodate the hawk’s more vigorous flight. Lest the reader presume that the hawk’s strengthening vigor signifies its hunting-readiness, the last few lines of the poem reiterate the fragility of the bird and its dependence on enclosure to grow strong. The final command employs both garder and fermer and warns that the greatest danger to the hawk is the austringer himself: 22. AND, s.v. “demurer” (v.a., v.n.1, 2, 4, 12)

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E d’iço ben vus gardez: Einz que il seit ferm, ne le en trahez! Il ne put taunt ben ne taunt bel Affermer cum en sun casel, Kar par aventure al prendre, Taunt cum la penne est si tendre, Le purroit hum mult tost blescer U aucune penne depescere. (167–74) [And restrain yourself from doing this: / before it is strong [or loyal], don’t take it out of the mews! / It cannot so well or so beautifully / strengthen as it can in its cage. / For it may happen upon taking it, / since the feathers are so fragile, / that one might very easily damage it / or break a feather.]

While the austringer has built a physical enclosure for the hawk, his most decisive intervention (removing the bird from its enclosure) must come from visually assessing the strength of the hawk and the extent to which it has recovered from any accidents when it was taken. Here the treatise terminates before actually explaining how it is that one might complete that assessment, and indeed the nephew has the last word, questioning this abstract configuration of enclosure: “E ceo vodroie jo saver / Coment jo doi apercever .  .  .” (175–76; And I would like to know this, / how should I perceive .  .  . ). The treatise ends before the uncle is able to offer a response, and its open questionwithout-­answer confirms two hermeneutic corollaries: first, its termination before offering any information about how to use the hawk to hunt negates the usage of this treatise for hawking, and second, the training narrative’s interruption at this point in the training, leaving the reader with this image of an expanding enclosure in perpetuity, or at least, until the reader turns the folio where the image remains while the reading continues.

MARIE’S YONEC: AUTHORING HER OWN ENCLOSURE The manuscript’s physical apposition of a discourse about falconry and a discourse about poetics found in Marie’s Prologue demonstrates how falconry’s preoccupation with control extends to poetry. Marie’s introduction to the lais poses questions about how poetic form might create or foreclose readers’ glossing potential. Here, falconry’s poetics of practice responds to the Prologue’s self-conscious attention to its own form. Introducing her poetry to readers, Marie describes a tension between a surplus meaning supplied

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by the reader and a poet’s control of her poetry’s reception. Readers following the “anciëns” who “assez oscurement diseient” (12; speak so obscurely) might “gloser la letre / e de lur sen le surplus metre” (15–16; gloss the letter and from their understanding add the excess), and, citing this practice, Marie invites readers to add a “surplus” to her “letre.”23 Taylor notes how Marie’s reference to the “anciëns” and the “obscurity [that] characterizes her own works” “implicitly claims for herself the authorial status of the classical poets [.  .  .] making her Prologue one of the earliest powerful assertions of vernacular 24 authorship.” Yet, even as Marie invokes this classical trope, she shows herself as participating in another powerful poetic activity: toiling over choosing the right words in the right order. Marie tells readers that she has often “veillié” (stayed awake)—or, as the verb veiller also suggests, kept watch—to put the lais in poetic form: “Rimé en ai e fait ditié / soventes feiz en ai veillié” (41–42; I have made rhymes from them and made them into poems / often I have stayed awake over them). Keeping watch over her “ditié” (stories, poems, words, but also treatises) suggests a level of control on the part of the poet not immediately apparent from her invitation to gloss. In both senses of the word veiller, to stay awake or to keep watch, this moment in the Prologue presupposes an eventual detachment of the poet from her words. She is doubly bound to the act of rendering heard “aventures” (36) into rhymed and recorded words: once by the memory of a physical labor that interfered with her body’s circadian rhythm, of “staying up late,” and again by the anxious recurrence of an obsessive surveillance, of “keeping watch.” By reminding the reader of her physical and mental suffering in making these “ditié,” she weaves into her prologue a kind of reading-instruction that the meaning “treatise” supports. Within Marie de France’s lais, representations of readers model the kind of reader-supplied glossing that Marie espouses in her prologue. Reading the lais through the lens of the Harley hawking treatise helps us see how Marie uses glossing to break the seal of enclosure that the lais’ narratives seem to present as confining and impermeable. Yonec in particular pivots on the representation of the female protagonist as a glossing interpreter of tales. In this lai, a jealous husband leaves his wife to wither, locked up in a tower. The lady prays to God to send her a secret lover like those she has heard described in aventures, or stories. No sooner does she complete her invocation than a goshawk flies through her window and turns into a handsome knight. The knight proves his worthiness by taking the Eucharist, first transforming into the lady herself to fool the priest into administering wafer and wine. Having ascertained that he is in fact a good Christian knight, the lady summons his 23. Citations to the Desgrugillers-Billard edition of Marie de France’s lais occur parenthetically in text by line number. My translations. 24. Taylor, Textual Situations, 102.

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amorous companionship often, which restores her former beauty. Interpreting his wife’s ebullient appearance as indicative of a secret love affair, the husband places spikes in the window, thereby mortally wounding the hawk-knight. Before flying away, the hawk-knight tells the lady that she carries his son. The lady leaps out the window after the hawk-knight and follows his trail of blood to a silver city, where he recounts how her son will avenge him. She returns to her tower, with gifts from the hawk-knight: a forgetting-ring to erase her husband’s memory, and a sword for her future son, Yonec. Years later the husband, the lady, and a grown Yonec visit the tomb in the silver city, where a crowd retells the tale of the hawk-knight, prompting the lady to reveal Yonec’s lineage. She falls into a fatal swoon, and after killing the jealous husband, her son Yonec becomes the sovereign of the city. In an effort to disrupt her unhappy stasis enclosed in the tower, the lady of Yonec turns to tales. Unable to control her situation, she turns to the substance of aventures for recollection; she turns to the form of poetry for invocation: Mut ai sovent oï cunter Que l’em suleit jadis trover Aventures en cest pais, Ki rechatouent les pensis: Chevalers trovoent puceles A lur talent, gentes e beles, E dames truvoent amanz Beaus e curteis e vaillanz, Si que blasmez n’en esteient, Ne nul fors eus nes veeient. Si ceo peot estrë e ceo fu, Si unc a nul est avenu, Deu, ki de tut ad poësté, Il en face ma volenté! (91–104) [I have very often heard recounted / that some while ago one used to find / stories in this land / that redeemed the downcast: / knights would find maidens / to their liking, noble and beautiful, / and ladies would find lovers / beautiful and courteous and valiant, / such that they couldn’t be blamed for it, / and no one outside would ever see them. / If that could be and if that was, / if it has ever happened to anyone, / God, who has power over all, / perform my will in this!]

This moment illustrates how the narrative mechanism behind her perceived freedom is the paradox of progressive diminishment. With each repetition

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of the imperfect tense “trovoent” (95, 97; would find), the lady retreats further and further into her own readerly conditioning—an interior space created by the practice of blending nostalgia with glossing. The verb trover (to find) permeates the lady’s supplication and becomes the term that unites her own reading practice with the action she wishes to draw out from the stories she has heard. For the lady, glossing becomes an active pursuit of perusing the stories of her aural memory to find an interpretation of those stories that will improve her situation within the bounds of her enclosure. Robert Sturges reads this moment as the lady’s desire “to be like a fictional character, and the fictions she wants to emulate correspond closely to this very collection of lais.”25 But rather than representing the lady’s desire to insert herself within a fiction, I think Marie uses this moment to show how reading and glossing can draw something out from a fiction. The fantastical element of her prayer— that God send her a lover whom no one else can see—does not seem that far removed from the nonfantastical act of interpretation, creating meaning from the lai that both is contained within the lai and expands beyond the lai within the reader’s imagination. The lady in Yonec, in fact, demonstrates the kind of glossing that the manuscript’s readers might adopt as their own reading practice. A familiar passage from the Harley hawking treatise models a similar mode of reading the past nostalgically, and looking toward that past to supply a gloss for the situation at hand: Mult volenters jol vus dirrai, Ke en escrit trové en ai Si cum jo lis e jo l’esgard, El livere al bon rei Edward; Kar jadis esteient Engleis Mult enseignez e mult curteis, E savoient affeitement. Plus ke ne savoient nule gent, E nomeement des oiseaus, Ki ourent sovent de bons e beaus. (13–22) [Quite willingly will I tell you / what I have found written about it [hawking], / just as I read and look at it in the book of good King Edward; / for once there were English people, / very well-mannered and very courtly, / and they knew falconry training. / They knew more than any other people, / and namely about birds, / of which they often had good and beautiful ones.] 25. Sturges, “Texts and Readers in Marie de France’s ‘Lais,’” 245.

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Transmission of falconry training finds a parallel with the lady’s nostalgic resurfacing of stories. And the result of that training—possessing good and beautiful birds—finds a resonance with knights and ladies finding and keeping, blamelessly, lovers. In his examination of Harley 978, Taylor interprets this moment in Yonec as a suggestion of the private use and reading practice of the lais and argues that a “self-referential” scene of “private reading rather than communal listening” “elicit[s] an image of the private woman reader for whom the poem opens up an inner freedom.”26 Viewed through the hawking treatise’s enclosure hermeneutic, which poses freedom to move and grow as possible within—and even requiring—a confined space, we can come to a fuller understanding of how the lai achieves this sensation of inner freedom through both formal and narrative elements. Though the hawk transforms into a male knight, the lady undergoes a hawklike enclosure for which the Harley hawking treatise prepares the reader. While hawking as a structure of knowledge might appear to stand in for control over the lady’s confined body, the lady’s mastery of her enclosed space allows her to use the principles of hawking to control her own narrative. The image of progressive diminishment from the hawking treatise mirrors the enclosure of the lady while allowing her to transcend her confinement. The lai sets up the tower as the lady’s ferme and offers the reader two opposing views of confinement: the first is offered by the lady’s husband, a lord; the second, by the hawk-knight. The hawking treatise sets up a parallel between the lady and a hawk, signaling that the means of the lady’s enclosure are as changeable as they are necessary. The species of bird “ostur,” or goshawk, denotes the female of the species and is the same word used across the treatise and the lai. The lai also clarifies with the detail of the hawking jesses that this is a falconry bird, and not a wild one, aligning it further with the hawking treatise: “en la chambre volant entra; / gez ot as piez, ostur sembla” (109–10; it flew into the chamber, / it had jesses on its feet, it seemed a goshawk). The hawking treatise helps explicate the lady’s modes of being enclosed, guiding the manuscript reader’s interpretation of the lai as a whole. The conclusion of the hawking treatise as it appears in Harley 978 warns that the ordeal of being captured is enough to render the eyass useless because it could be shocked into never growing strong flight feathers or developing a loyal disposition. Therefore, as we have seen, the austringer must handle the eyass barehanded and gently, ensure that its feathers undergo minimal damage in the ordeal, and then allow it to heal fully before removing it from its enclosure. Though the austringer cannot directly control the hawk’s growth and feather-strength, he can create circumstances in the ferme that either facilitate or impede its 26. Taylor, Textual Situations, 110.

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growth from weak to strong. The hawking treatise’s discussion of enclosure helps readers see that while the husband’s improper confinement proved noxious for the lady, not all confinement in the lai is damaging. The success of trapping an eyass that will mature properly, according to our treatise, lies in the way the austringer encloses its body. We will see that the husband’s enclosure does little to facilitate the lady’s growth—in this case there is no paradox. The diminished space results in a diminished occupant. But precisely when the lai grants the lady the power to gloss and invoke aventures within her enclosure, the goshawk alters the space, allowing the lady to transcend her confinement even as she remains confined. The hawking treatise affirms the inefficacy of the lord’s mode of enclosing the lady, using readers’ knowledge about hawking to delegitimize the lord’s claim to his wife’s body. The opening of the lai depicts a lord who encloses his wife in a tower, but parallel language in the opening of the hawking treatise casts into relief his damaging mode of confinement, foreclosing any sympathy readers might bring to their interpretation of the imminent cuckold. Emma Campbell discusses the way the lai works subtly, through the blending of species and narrative voices, to shift readers’ sympathies from the lord’s claim to his wife’s body to the knight’s “illegitimate progeny” and “the foundation for a new regime.”27 Campbell discusses how readers would have interpreted the knight as infused with the noble nature associated with goshawks. Reading the lai through the hawking treatise helps supplement such iconographic associations. The intricacies of avian–human relationships outlined in the Harley hawking treatise further illuminate the human relationships in Yonec. While the nephew in the hawking treatise desires to know “la manere e les murs / ke deivent garder les osturs” (9–10; the manner and the behaviors / of those who must keep hawks), the husband makes no effort to learn how enclosure would benefit his wife: “De ceo ke ele iert bele e gente / En li garder mist tute s’entente: / Dedenz sa tur l’ad enserreie” (25–27; Because she was beautiful and noble, / he put all his intent in keeping her: / he had closed her up in his tower). Where the hawking treatise instructs how an austringer encloses an eyass properly to foster its healthy and proper growth, the husband takes a wife whose beauty and nobility he contains, and subsequently suffocates: Mut ert la dame en grant tristur Od lermes, od suspir e plur; Sa beuté pert en teu mesure, Cum cele que n’en ad cure. (45–48) 27. Campbell, “Political Animals,” 106.

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[The lady dwelled for a long time in great sadness, / with tears, with sighs and weeping. / She lost her beauty / like one who does not care about it.]

The lord’s enclosure forces the lady to dwell within her own sadness, and her lugubrious affliction demonstrates how the lord’s mode of enclosing the lady diminishes space in a way that stifles, rather than facilitates, growth. The lord is not able to control the lady’s appearance because he does not understand how to control her space. Howie discusses characters’ transformed appearances in terms of controlling the enclosure: “Appearances have consequences. They can be controlled [. . .] or uncontrolled, [. . .] but they are never merely phenomena. Appearances matter; appearances materialize.”28 That the lady has been enclosed seven years, receiving visits from her lord and chaperone only, and that she was originally sought after by the lord to produce an heir, contributes to the ill-suitedness of the lord to his wife. Campbell points out that the text depicts the “barrenness of the marriage” as “unnatural” to anticipate approval of the knight’s virile visits to the lady.29 The hawking treatise helps us see how the lord’s mode of enclosing, specifically, is metonymic for their fruitless union. Unlike the nephew’s intent to “aprendre” (8; learn) the manner and behaviors appropriate for garder (keeping) birds, the husband’s intent is to garder only, or, in other words, to keep for the sake of keeping, which results in no heir, no future sovereign. Where, under the lord’s keeping, enclosure had seemed unnatural and harmful, the lady’s lover reverses the way the lady is enclosed, resulting in her flourishing beauty and swelling body. Having offered the lord’s enclosing tactic as an example of the wrong way to enclose, the lai authorizes instead the hawk-knight’s mode of enclosing the lady’s body, thereby legitimating his use of her body to carry his own lineage. The reader will recall from the hawking treatise that the bird “ne put taunt ben ne taunt bel / affermer cum en sun casel” (169–70; cannot strengthen so well or so beautifully / as it can in its cage). Similarly, the lady’s beauty is restored thanks to a transformed enclosure with the hawk-knight: Sun cors tient a grant chierté, Tute recovre sa beauté. Or li plest plus a surjurner Qu’en nul autre deduit aler! (215–18)

28. Howie, Claustrophilia, 125–26. 29. Campbell, “Political Animals,” 105.

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[She holds her body very dear, / she recovers all her beauty. / Now it pleases her more to stay / than to go for any other pleasure.]

The result of her enclosure with the hawk-knight so alters her that “esteit tut sis semblanz changez” (227; her whole appearance was changed). In managing her healthy transformation, the hawk-knight places himself in the position of austringer and the lady in the position of eyass, though he assures the lady that his manner of keeping her has more to do with assuring her safety than keeping her as an object: “Gardez ke seiez a seür” (124; Be assured that you are safe). Here the narrative offers an alternative way to interpret enclosure: a salvific space rather than a claustrophobic one. Henceforth, the hawk-knight alters the way garder functions in the narrative: the lord’s threatening form of enclosure has been replaced by the hawk-knight’s restorative form. Enclosure, as an action done to the lady, no longer threatens noble lineage, because the lady, like a growing eyass, has grown “ferm” (strong) even “en sun casel” (in its cage), and indeed has even grown the hawk-knight’s heir within her body. If this second kind of enclosure emboldens the lady, it is not strictly because of the male manager of the enclosure; it is also due to the lady’s own use of the narrowing spaces, for as they diminish, they allow an expansion. The lady’s movements in the lai, like the eyass’s movements in the hawking treatise, form concentric enclosures, ever tighter. As the lady retreats inward to look for stories of secret lovers, her invocation conjures the hawk-knight, expanding and transcending the physical limits of her body in its confinement. She turns her thoughts and desires into manifest objects within the enclosure, and, at the same time, she uses her creations to restore her health and beauty. Dolores Frese sees the lady’s transformation within the enclosure as the coalescence of Marie’s “simultaneous poetic agendas”: “the inherited male matiere, and the sens of imaginative surplus made available through the newly productive activity of female ecriture.”30 While they are both in the tower, there is a kind of parity between male matiere and female ecriture because of the shared enclosure-space between the lady and the hawk-knight. Yet the fact that the lady’s own body contains not only Yonec but also the story of Yonec’s lineage means that female enclosure potentiates a storytelling that supersedes the dying hawk-knight’s semiotic power. As Campbell points out, because the lady carries Yonec in her womb and the hawk-knight’s retold history in her memory, she “thus becomes a vessel for the lai itself, bearing the story’s conclusion within her as well as carrying it as a tale she must tell her son.”31 Storytelling and story-keeping thus become inextricably caught up in 30. Frese, “Marie de France and the ‘Surplus of Sense,’” 231. 31. Campbell, “Political Animals,” 104.

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the lady’s body. The lady keeps and transmits her story, from her memory to her womb, and finally to the son whom her body will issue. Using her confinement as a kind of incubator for her story, the lady of the lai shows how story-keeping can sustain and make use of diminished space to engage in storytelling at the right moment. I have argued that the hawking treatise and the lai produce a hermeneutic that helps readers see how enclosure functions in poetry without confining the interpretive surplus of the poem, and that this simultaneous diminishment and expansion works through the formal features of the poem as well. In the first section of this chapter, I discussed how the hawking treatise uses garder’s simultaneous meanings of “looking” and “enclosing” to set up a reading hermeneutic. Looking, working in tandem with the action of reading, allows the reader, like the lady in the lai, to separate out a moment in a story and enclose that moment in the mind’s eye, where the reader looks at it until it expands again, unfolding the narrative from a single moment. In Yonec this moment begins in the transubstantiation scene, progresses to the hawk-knight’s silver city, and loops back to the lady’s tower, condensing the entire lai into the moment of eucharistic ritual, here repurposed for the poetic mechanism of progressive diminishment. Frese and Peggy McCracken have urged us to reconsider the transubstantiation scene, previously dismissed by critics as a misappropriation of a holy sacrament that ushers in the subsequent adultery.32 Rather than read this scene as establishing an ethically ambivalent stance on the morality of the adultery plot, I believe it helps us understand the role of form in the narrative. McCracken demonstrates that what the prologue to the lais and Yonec share is their take on leaving “obscure secrets” unglossed 33 for the reader. Frese and McCracken both see the transubstantiation scene as communicating the pleasurably obscure surplus of language to the reader, and I add to their formulation by arguing that the formal features of the scene model on a small scale how the reader might interpret the entire lai. The description of a ritualistic action in the hawking treatise helps us understand how a ritualistic loop in the lai performs a narrative diminishment. As the lady follows the hawk-knight’s blood, the description of her movements through the silver city resembles a ritual like that described in the hawking treatise’s section on food preparation. Structurally, a ritual, or an action meant to be repeated, creates a loop in the narrative. The image of a progression that loops back on itself exposes the mechanism of progressive diminishment at work in the lai. Harley 978’s readers will recall that the ceremony with which the hawk’s meal is prepared involves grinding an egg yolk 32. Frese cites J. De Caluwé, Paula Clifford, and Phillipe Ménard among “a host of other critical observations, similarly situated in the same rather literal vein” (229). 33. McCracken, “Translation and Animals in Marie de France’s Lais,” 21.

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in a silver chalice and sprinkling the enclosed contents with milk and blood in a manner that, like a ritual, is meant to be repeated: E od le manche de un cutel Les triblez en un net vessel E sur tuz autres meuz vaudreit Le vessel de argent, ki le avereit [. . .] Triblez les ben. Quan ço ert fet, Si le arusez ben de duz let. Apres ço lur poez doner. E si le oisel n’en veut guster, Un petit le ensanglantez, E il en mangera assez. (143–46; 151–56) [And with the handle of a knife / grind [egg yolks] in a clean vessel. / And better than any other would be / a silver vessel, if one has one, / [. . .] / Grind them well. When this is done, / then sprinkle well with sweet milk. / Afterwards you may give this to them. / And if the bird doesn’t want to taste it, / bloody it a little, / and it will eat a lot of it.]

The treatise instructs the reader to repeat these steps as often as it takes to assure “ke il eient manger assez” (128; that [the eyasses] have plenty to eat) and that they “ne eient feim” (129; are not hungry). The image of an action that is repeated, like a ritual, contains the movement pursuant to the ritual within a kind of narrative loop, moving forward but with the intention to move backward, to return and repeat. While descriptions of silver and blood in the lai’s deathbed scene diminish narrative spaces, shifting verb tense brings the narrative into present time, expanding this scene to encompass multiple planes in the lai and in the manuscript. As the lady follows the traces of blood through the landscape, she enters a city so argentine that “n’i ot mesun, sale ne tur / Ki ne parust tute d’argent” (362–63; there was not house, hall, nor tower / that did not seem entirely of silver). The progression from house (“mesun”) to hall (“sale”) to tower (“tur”) relies on the image of diminishment, evoking ever smaller and more confining spaces. Here the description of diminishing spaces anticipates the lady’s movements through the silver city into ever smaller enclosures until she arrives at the hawk-knight’s deathbed. The “sanc novel” (373; fresh blood) sprinkled throughout the silver city leads the lady through these diminishing spaces: “par mi le burc, deske al chastel [. . .] al paleis vient al paviment” (374,

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377; through the middle of the town as far as the castle [. . .] at the palace she comes to the paved hall). This last space, “del sanc [.  .  .] treve tut sanglent” (378; she finds [. . .] all bloodied with blood), evoking the hawking treatise’s command to bloody (ensanglenter) the contents of the silver chalice. In this couplet, the narration shifts to present tense, “vient” (377; she comes) and “treve” (378; she finds), though the preceding and following couplets use preterite verb forms (375, 376, 379, 380; “parla,” “trova,” “entra,” “trova”). This rupture in narrative time from past to present brings the narrative to the reader’s real-time experience, pulling the reader’s attention away from the plot and redirecting it to the experience of reading poetry in this manuscript.34 This momentary rupture might allow the reader to step back from the narrative of the lai and consider the ritualistic description from the hawking treatise, or even the reader’s own experience of real-life ecclesiastic rituals. The silver enclosures and blood in the lai are not overtly repeated, but the hawking treatise’s feeding ritual helps us see these details of the lai as contributing to the ecclesiastic image of the Eucharist ritual, which moves the reader backwards in the narrative to the transubstantiation scene in the tower. This scene is poised to fold all of the lai in on itself, condensing it, because it looks backwards and forwards, helping to enclose all the narrative of the lai into one single moment of the text. After assuring the lady that he is a good Christian, the hawk-knight tells her, “Le semblant de vus prendrai, / Le cors deu receverai” (161–62; I will take on your appearance, / I will receive the body of God). The purpose of the identity-transformation is to assuage the lady’s fear of engaging in a love relationship with the potentially ungodly creature she has just witnessed transform from a hawk to a man. For this reason, the hawkknight’s assumption of the lady’s appearance contains within it his transformation from hawk to man, which looks back even further to the lady’s desire to transform her reality into the fictional aventures from her aural memory. The lai’s narrative offers the reader the opportunity to follow the lady’s transcendent mode of reading in its presentation of the transubstantiation scene, which uses formal elements to condense and expand the entire lai into one diegetic moment. The hawk-knight’s and the lady’s spatial arrangement as well as the lady’s deathbed performance in this scene look forward to the hawk-knight’s death in the chamber of the silver city, collapsing both scenes into one another. This collapse performs the paradox of progressive diminishment for the reader; that is, the narrative progression from the lady’s tower to the hawk-knight’s tomb is condensed into just a few lines of the lai in the lady’s performed deathbed scene in the tower. In her analysis of the strange 34. See Fleischman, Tense and Narrativity.

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transformations of the lai, McCracken poses a series of questions that point to the obscurity of the transubstantiation scene: it is not clear whether the lady and knight actually become the same entity at this point or whether one of them disappears.35 By itself, the transubstantiation scene does not clarify these questions; however, employing the hermeneutic of progressive diminishment, that is, reading this scene together with the hawk-knight’s death scene, offers a resolution to the perceived obscurity of the lady’s and hawk-knight’s positions. After the hawk-knight tells the lady of his plan to prove his creed, “delez li s’est cuchié al lit” (166; he lay beside her on the bed). The lady feigns illness in front of her chaperone and requests that the chaplain give her the Eucharist. The text describes the chaperone as seeing the lady, but the feminine pronoun makes it unclear at which point the hawk-knight takes the lady’s appearance (“cele le vit”; 182; that one [the chaperone] saw her). It is not until the hawk-knight receives the Eucharist that a definitive masculine subject takes over the lady’s feminine pronoun: “E corpus domini aportot / Li chevaler l’ad retenu” (186–87; and [the priest] brought the corpus domini / the knight has received it). The subsequent spatial description positions the lovers next to one another, but this time a female subject is the agent of the verb: “La dame gist lez sun ami” (191; the lady lay beside her love). Marie’s obscure description of this transformation from hawk to knight, from knight to lady, asks readers to attend to pronoun gender and positioning. Howie’s reading of this scene also attends to the prepositions “delez” and “lez” (beside and alongside) that position them 36 “at once beside and inside each other,” in what he calls a “poetics—but also 37 an ontology—of metonymy”: “Their adjacent, proximate bodies do somehow get inside each other [. . .] but not without Marie’s insistence on their simultaneous separateness.”38 In this strange transference and retention of agential power, the hawk-knight’s absorption of the lady first in semblance and then in positioning looks forward to the deathbed scene, where his body seems to, once again, coalesce with hers while retaining a separateness. In the silver city, upon recognizing her bleeding beloved, the lady “par desus lui cheï pasmee” (396; collapsed swooning onto him). That the lady physically traverses the distance between the transubstantiation scene and the deathbed scene (where she and the hawk-knight recreate elements of the transubstantiation scene) and then makes the return trip to the tower, and then back again to the silver city with her son, turns her movement into a kind of formal refrain, enclosing the entire narrative in her movement between the two scenes. 35. McCracken, “Translation and Animals in Marie de France’s Lais,” 19. 36. Howie, Claustrophilia, 127. 37. Howie, Claustrophilia, 2. 38. Howie, Claustrophilia, 127.

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In this way, these two texts from Harley 978 set up a hermeneutic of progressive diminishment that readers can take with them as they encounter other forms of poetry that evoke the paradox of enclosure and expansion. The narrative movement from the transubstantiation scene to the lady’s journey over the landscape performs a series of concentric enclosures on a feedback loop: the tower encloses the lady and hawk-knight; the silver city encloses the triple-chamber, which encloses the bodies of both the hawk-knight and the lady, whose body encloses Yonec; the tower once again encloses the lady’s body, Yonec, and the story of the hawk-knight and the silver city. In both the transubstantiation scene and the hawk-knight’s death scene, the lady’s body has been momentarily absorbed into the hawk-knight’s body, or his into hers. In other words, their bodies and their narratives have collapsed into one another. The hawking treatise’s depiction of a single enclosure enabling both diminishment and expansion allows readers of the lai to imagine both scenes happening at once. This collapse of the two scenes allows readers to enclose the entire lai into a doubled image that they can more easily take with them when they have finished with Harley 978. In the context of Harley 978, Marie’s invitation to gloss allows the reader to continue the dialogic model and role of the questioning nephew that the Harley hawking treatise initiated. Monica Brzezinski Potkay argues that the surplus Marie intends for the reader to add is none other than the pleasure of language.39 If the hawking treatise encourages its readers to consider how the manuscript’s contents are grouped together, then the surplus pleasure of language one might find in reading the lais also extends back to the experience of reading the hawking treatise. Through Marie’s lais, and in particular through Yonec, we understand the fragility of the bird’s feathers, the legible but also mutable traces of the bird’s confinement and growth in relation to the containment of poetry. That is, the constraints of poetry are what render it at once a legible record of the poet’s imagination and a flexible object in the reader’s memory. Once Marie has recorded her lais, essentially shedding those verses like feathers, she allows for them to be enclosed in the reader’s mind and carried with the reader. If Marie felt anxiety about leaving her poetry in the hands of readers, she also allowed for them to break her poetry into fragments, interpret it, and reimagine diminished spaces in new forms. The final lines of the Harley hawking treatise, read through the paradox of enclosure that we’ve seen in the rest of the treatise and in Yonec, seem to encapsulate this relationship between poet, text, and reader. Here I repeat the final four lines of the uncle in our treatise: 39. Potkay, “Parable of the Sower and Obscurity,” 372.

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Kar par aventure al prendre, Taunt cum la penne est si tendre, Lu purroit hum mult tost blescer U aucune penne depescere. (171–74) [For it may happen upon taking it, / since the feathers are so fragile, / that one might very easily damage it / or break a feather.]

Through the concerns of Yonec, we might now understand that the hawking treatise is discussing not only the body of the hawk but also the fragility of poetry itself and the interpretive potential that this fragility yields in the hands of readers who have been carefully trained to garder (look at) and to take garde (care) of both the hawk and the poetic line. Ultimately, I am arguing that this reading strategy is not unique to Harley 978 and this particular set of texts; what I hope to have shown in this chapter and throughout the book so far is that references to falconry birds in poetry evince a mode of thinking and interpreting that found expression and theorization in writings about falconry. The next chapter takes up the theory of memory control in falconry training to think more broadly about memory as an embodied practice, particularly in the Auchinleck English lay Sir Orfeo.

CHAPTER 4

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

If, as we saw in the last chapter, poets like Marie de France trained their readers to gloss both carefully and expansively, they must surely have relied on some process of willful erasure on the part of the reader. And when poets adapted into English both Marie’s lais and ancient stories, as they did in the Auchinleck Manuscript, they had to contend with the predecessor narratives lingering in readers’ minds. Derek Pearsall characterizes the audience of the Auchinleck Manuscript as “one that wished to be both edified and entertained, one that relished familiar piety and instruction, but one that also desired access, in the native tongue, to the historical dignities and fashionable haut 1 monde of romance.” Pearsall bases this claim on the contents of the “massive book,” which includes “many of the types of English verse writing of the period” “but [is] dominated by popular romances” such as the anonymous Sir Orfeo.2 This vernacular adaptation of the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into an English lay adds to the picture of the Auchinleck audience, and their method of reading. According to James Simpson, generic expectations for the literary form of the lay—a genre that succinctly and poetically threatens its characters with separation but ends in reunion—clash with narrative expectations for the familiar story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which ends

1. Pearsall, “Auchinleck Manuscript Forty Years On,” 13. 2. Pearsall, “Auchinleck Manuscript Forty Years On,” 13. • 103 •

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in tragic separation.3 The co-existence of these expectations relies on a kind of forgetting on the part of the reader. The myth itself offers one model of forgetting (classical Orpheus forgets the caveat to not turn around and thus loses Eurydice a second time), but I suggest that the lay uses falconry conventions to enable Heurodis’s recovery within the narrative, as well as the recovery of her literary foremother, Eurydice of the classical Orpheus myth. In a crucial turning point of the narrative, Orfeo sees his lost Heurodis among sixty hawking women and “nouȝt o man amonges hem þer nis; / & Ich a faucoun on hond bere, / And riden on haukin bi o riuere” (306–8; not a single man is among them; / and each bore a hawk on hand, / and they ride hawking by the river).4 Remarkably, each of the hawking women’s sixty falcons “his pray slouȝ” (313; slew its prey). Here, the poem depicts Heurodis as a captive woman who nonetheless retains command over herself and her hawk in the single successful hunting episode of the lay; the poem thus uses falconry to make possible a feminism that arises from an apparent domestication, overturning a facile correspondence between domesticated birds and domesticated wives. A variation on a seemingly straightforward comparison between women and falcons offers a glimpse of how comparing wifely conduct to falconry does not neatly map one cultural tradition onto another but instead foregrounds the ambiguities constitutive of each. References to falconry that perform just this kind of work pepper the Auchinleck Manuscript.5 Romances of the Auchinleck Manuscript engage readers’ knowledge of falconry training to champion the art of falconry per se and the arts of combat and courtship through falconry metaphors. For example, Guy of Warwick and Sir Tristrem depend on an audience’s familiarity with the varying values of sparrowhawks and gyrfalcons, values deriving from these species’ trainability. Similarly, King Richard and Sir Beues of Hamtoun both use an identical metaphor comparing the knight’s battle-readiness to a hawk’s flight-readiness (yarak in modern terms): “he” (Sir Beues of Hamtoun) or “Richard” was as “fresche to fiȝ[t] / As is þe faucoun to þe fliȝt” (King Richard 554–55; Sir Beues 736–37). But this manuscript also compares noblewomen to hawks, as in the “Alphabetical Praise of Women”:

3. Simpson, “Cognition Is Recognition,” 33. 4. Citations to Bliss’s edition of Sir Orfeo occur parenthetically in text by line number and are followed by my translations into modern English for clarity. 5. All citations to the Auchinleck Manuscript, with the exception of Sir Orfeo, are taken from the National Library of Scotland’s website The Auchinleck Manuscript and occur parenthetically in text by line number.

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Gentelri is a plaunt, as y ȝou telle, In wiman it springeþ in ich a liȝþ, Þai er meke & noþing felle, Hende in halle as hauke in friȝþ. (56–59) [Gentility is a plant, as I tell you, / in women it springs in each a little. / They are meek and not wicked at all, / obedient in the court as a hawk in the forest.]

The metaphor here suggests that a hawk’s natural countenance in the wild is akin to a woman’s natural nobility in the court. But there is something amiss in this line that compares a woman’s obedience and nobility (hende) to a hawk in the forest. The poem alters the alliterative phrase “hende as hauk in halle” and, in so doing, significantly alters the poem’s association with falconry birds.6 “Hende” encompasses a range of meanings: noble, beautiful, mild, tame, clever.7 A woman who is as “hende” as a hawk in “halle” evokes the image of a tame and quiet hawk on a perch under such control that it acts noble and demure even when surrounded by the bustle of the court. This image retains the courtly valence that “halle” reinforces as well as a sense of demure obedience pursuant to taming a wild bird. A woman who is “hende” as a hawk in the forest alters the meaning of “hende” entirely, for a hawk in the forest is not demure, mild, or tame but ready to hunt. Its nobility therefore derives from its association with a place that is beyond the control of courtly conventions, outside the “halle.” As in Marie de France’s Yonec, the romances in this manuscript explicitly connect women with falconry, and not only through metaphors comparing women to hawks but also by depicting women with hawking experience. The eponymous female protagonist of Horne Child and Maiden Rimnild sends Horn a goshawk and hawking gloves as a token, and her control of the hawk’s movements suggests control of where her love will “liȝt”: Þan a seriaunt sche bad go, A gentil goshauk for to ta— Fair he was to fliȝt— Þerwiþ herten gloues to— Swiche was þe maner þo— 6. See Pearl, whose dreamer notes that upon seeing Pearl, “I stod as hende as hawk in halle” (184). For a discussion of this simile in the context of the entire poem, see Remein, “‘Pyȝt’: Ornament, Place, and Site—A Commentary on the Fourth Fitt of Pearl.” 7. Middle English Dictionary Online (hereafter MED), s.v. “hende” (adj.1c, 1d, 2c, 2d, 3a).

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& ȝaf Haþerof of her ȝif[t]. Sche wende bi Haþerof, Horn it were, Þat loued hunting noþing more, On him hir loue was liȝt. (337–45) [Then she bade a servant go / to take a noble goshawk— / he was beautiful in flight— / with two deer-skin gloves— / such was the manner then— / and gave Haþerof her gift. / She found out through Haþerof that Horn / loved nothing more than hunting; / her love alighted on him.]

This verb, aliȝten, which was used to describe the descent of birds, humans, and here an abstract emotion, acts out on her behalf what the goshawk sym8 bolized: the arrival of her love to Horn. The verb is one we shall see again in Sir Orfeo to describe ladies’ actions directly following an exclusively female falconry scene. There, too, Heurodis’s birdlike action trains Orfeo to interpret her hawk as an extension of herself. Sir Orfeo’s first violent action, Heurodis’s self-mutilation, is prompted by her memory; her speech engages that memory to train Orfeo to locate her once she is abducted a second time. A brief summary contextualizes the mutilation and abductions: one midday, Heurodis enters the court’s orchard with her handmaidens to hear birds sing. During her nap under a grafted tree, she is abducted into a fairy world. The memory of this abduction, which she recalls when she awakens under the same tree, prompts her to cry, scream, tear at her hands and feet, scratch her face till it bleeds, and rend her robes. She is forcibly taken to her chamber, where Orfeo meets her to hear what prompted her outburst. Here occurs Heurodis’s only speech, a 44-line analepsis, in the 604-line poem. She recounts that she must leave Orfeo, and when he objects, she describes her memory of the abduction to explain why. During her slumber, she says, two fairy knights carried her off to a land of many more fairy knights and damsels, more beautiful than any she had ever seen. She was taken to the fairy king, who conducted her through the land’s ever bright architectural and natural wonders, and then returned her home with the warning that she must return to the same spot, under the grafted tree on the following day, to be taken to the fairy world again, permanently. If she puts up resistance, the fairy king told her, her body will be torn apart and her limbs will be carried off to the fairy world anyway. The following day, though Orfeo has gathered a thousand knights to safeguard Heurodis, she is snatched away. Bereft, Orfeo departs for a solitary life in the forest, renouncing the sight of all 8. MED, s.v. “alighten” (v.1.2a).

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women, and bequeathing his kingdom to whomever his people choose by parliament should they hear of his death, and, in the meantime, the steward. He wanders in the woods for ten years, enchanting all the beasts with his harping, and many times he catches sight of the fairy king and his entourage on unsuccessful hunts. He also witnesses other kinds of courtly revelry, among them a successful hawking episode: a troupe of exclusively female falconers, wherein he spies his Heurodis flying her hawk at waterfowl. They see one another but don’t speak a word. Her female companions whisk her away. Orfeo follows them into an ornately wrought and luminescent castle, where he sees a host of mangled and disfigured inhabitants, among them, but not disfigured, Heurodis sleeping under a grafted tree. The moment of recognition between Orfeo and Heurodis occurs while Heurodis is hunting waterfowl with her hawk. However, the very importance of Orfeo’s anagnorisis for the ensuing recovery of Heurodis and their return to the court has taken precedent over a critical discussion of the falconry that ushers in this climactic recognition. For instance, Simpson, whose foundational claims about recognition in reading practice direct attention to this scene, overlooks the hawking event, linking instead Orfeo’s observation of dancing women to the recognition scene: “[Orfeo] follows a group of ‘faerie’ women as they dance in the forest. He and his wife recognize each other.”9 While Elliot Kendall discusses how the “encounter with the hawking party” allows Orfeo to connect something from his own world to the fairy world, he does not explain why hawking, specifically, should enable this inversion, or 10 how Heurodis’s role as falconer is a factor in her recovery. Yet, attention to the description of the falconry episode reveals that it is not just Heurodis that Orfeo recognizes; it is her successful hawk that he sees and recognizes because he was “y-won swiche werk to se” (317), and, as I argue, he was trained by Heurodis to do so. In terms of social context, a character like Orfeo would be accustomed to seeing such a hawking party because, pursuant to a courtly education, he would have had a working familiarity with not only the spectacle of, but also the training of falconry.11 And in fact, the work of falconry as a human craft, work that recalls to the present the instruction one has received in the past, is an activity that relies on and sharpens the craft of memory for the practitioner. But controlling the memory of the trainee, the hawk itself, is also integral work of falconry, relevant here for our understanding of memory in the lay. 9. Simpson, “Cognition Is Recognition,” 27. 10. Kendall, “Family, Familia, and the Uncanny in Sir Orfeo,” 322. 11. As noted in chapter 1, “by the twelfth century, if not earlier, training in falconry had become part of an upper-class education” (Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 111).

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Falconry treatises systematically connect memory, sight, and mutilation in their description of the seeling phase of training. In this phase the falconer seels, or temporarily binds shut, the bird’s eyelids to block out visual stimuli, make it forget its former wildness, and forge new memories with its human handler. Seeling the bird’s eyelids shut upon capture prevented it from taking in visual stimulation, which would conjure memories of the wild, resulting in a self-mutilating response to captivity. Seeling trains the subject to physically look at the world without figuratively looking back into memory. Put simply, it causes the hawk to look upon something familiar in a new way. Characters in the poem train one another through vision and memory manipulation; in turn, their training extends to readers, reconfiguring their memory of Eurydice from the poem’s classical source. The trained falcons that appear briefly in Sir Orfeo make it possible for readers to understand the training that occurs elsewhere in the lay through the seeling phase of falconry. Knowledge of the seeling phase of training implicit in this successful hawking venture, in which sixty ladies with sixty falcons catch sixty mallards, herons, and cormorants, can be ascribed to Heurodis and her courtly audience, composed of Orfeo and the lay’s listeners or readers. Heurodis’s hypersuccessful falconry hunt in this episode casts into relief the unsuccessful ways in which she herself has been captured. In particular, Heurodis’s self-mutilation and the fairyland’s unusual brightness suggest falconry’s seeling phase, which as we shall see in the next section, if done incorrectly, prompts the bird to either self-mutilate, or escape.

SEELING AND SELF-MUTILATION IN FALCONRY Seeling operated according to two principles, both relevant to the violence that occurs in Sir Orfeo. First, seeling required a controlled mutilation to foreclose an uncontrolled self-mutilation. Second, this controlled mutilation manipulated the subject’s memory: seeling prevented the subject from look12 ing with its eyes so that it could not look back with its mind’s eye. Book II of Frederick II’s treatise De arte venandi cum avibus (On the Art of Hunting with Birds) provides the most thorough explanation of the theories of memory and vision underpinning the motivation for the seeling phase of training. For our purposes, Frederick’s discussion of seeling is useful insofar as it reveals what 12. In The Book of Memory, Mary Carruthers points out the pervasiveness of the notion of “the eye of the mind” in medieval discourse on memory. The figurative relationship between vision and memory derives from an operative relationship between the two, as Carruthers thoroughly outlines in her work (19).

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happens to memory and body when seeling goes wrong, how memory manipulation might fail, and what that failure looks like for the physical state of the bird and for its interrupted training. Frederick’s incisive observations about memory in this animal might surprise the modern reader; his text shows an understanding of this nonhuman creature’s ability to form memories and associate visual triggers with past trauma. Before even beginning his discussion of seeling, Frederick uses the verbs videre, consuere, and recordare to describe what the hawk does. These verbs ascribe memory to falcons, and specifically a kind of memory that is formed by seeing and becoming habituated to sights. Having observed the adverse effects of ignoring falcons’ sensitive vision-memory circuits, Frederick reasons that seeling improperly, or not seeling at all, is undesirable for two main reasons: first, if the hawk sees too many new things “que videre non consuevit” (342.7; that it was not accustomed to seeing) too suddenly, it will be reminded of its present captivity and former freedom, prompting efforts to escape.13 Second, if the hawk sees old things it was accustomed to seeing, including any degree of light, which it can perceive even through closed eyes, “recordaretur aere claro, in quo esse consueverat” (366.27–28; it would remember the bright atmosphere, the place it had been accustomed to being [i.e., the open air from its life in the wild]) and, again, would make efforts to escape. In both cases, sight of familiar and unfamiliar objects, places, or people could cause unrest, so sight is the sense that must be withheld and reintroduced slowly by controlling the amount of light that enters the bird’s visual field. While seeling is essentially a controlled mutilation of the lower eyelids of the bird, the results of both not seeling and seeling poorly could be the same: self-mutilation. If the falcons are not seeled at all, “fierent magis inmansueti et magis agrestes” (312.7; they would become more savage and wilder), and an unseeled bird “distraheret et disrumperet pennas suas et sua membra” (342.8–9; would tear out its feathers and break apart its limbs). Even when it is seeled, though, a bird might rend (dilacerat [400.3]) its eyelids, damaging its vision, the sine qua non of hunting for birds of prey. Frederick warns that the hawk might raspat autem, ubi est ciliatura, propter duas causas. Una est quia vult removere ligamen ab oculis, ut possit videre, alia, quia ex ciliatura dolent palpebre, [. . .] immittendo pedem inter caput et ciliaturam, et rumpit ciliaturam et dilacerat palpebras. (398.30–400.3) 13. Citations to the Budriesi edition of Frederick II, De arte venandi cum avibus, occur parenthetically in text by page and line number. Unless otherwise noted, emphases are added. Translations are my own.

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[scratch where the suturing is, for two reasons. One is because it wants to remove the suture from its eyes, so that it can see, and the other is because its eyelids are suffering from the seeling, [.  .  .] inserting its talon between the head and the sutures, it both breaks the sutures and rends the eyelids.]

At this stage of training, the falconer must constantly weigh risks: the bird might injure itself if handled disagreeably, which would either render it useless or delay its training until after its recovery. But, as Frederick describes throughout Book II, any delay in training sets the bird back in terms of habituating it to humans and its new surroundings. If the bird is not consistently trained, it forgets all that it has learned in the company of humans and is easily induced by even the smallest perception of light back to its wild state. Frederick instructs that the first thing the falconer must do, then, is withhold the hawk’s vision to erase its traumatic memory of initial capture. After trapping the hawk-to-be-trained, the falconer covers the hawk’s head to block out visual stimuli, such as human faces or light, which would disturb the hawk to the point of self-mutilation and which the hawk might later associate with being captured. The falconer then inserts a threaded needle through the bird’s lower eyelids, pulls the threads so that the lower and upper eyelids meet, and knots the threads together behind the crown of the head, laying the feathers over the knot to ensure that the threads keep the eyelids closed (see fig. 4.1). Here, Frederick’s description explicitly states that seeing (video) might cause self-mutilation (disrumpo); further, he explains how the experience of a vision-induced mutilation causes the bird to retain (habeo) a feeling associated with something it has seen, forming a permanent memory: Nam si non ciliaretur statim, fieret agrestior ad visum faciei humane et ceterorum que videre non consuevit, et uteretur magno conamine ad evadendum, ex quo conamine distraheret et disrumperet pennas suas et sua membra, et ob hoc haberet hominem odio, credens hec mala sibi accedisse per hominem. (342.6–10) [For if it is not seeled immediately, it would become wilder at the sight of a human face and other things that it was not accustomed to see, and it might make great efforts to escape, and through this exertion it would tear out its feathers and break apart its limbs, on account of this it would hold humans in hatred, believing this bad thing to have happened to it because of them.]

Frederick’s suggestion that the hawk would become wilder as a result of seeing its new surroundings reveals an essential link between its disposition and its

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FIGURE 4. 1. Detail of folio 113r of De arte venandi cum avibus, l’art de chace des oisiaus, BnF MS Fr 12400. Used with permission from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

visual memory. By withholding the hawk’s ability to see, the falconer also withholds the hawk’s ability to recall memories of its wild past, which would then inform the hawk that it is no longer in the same environment. Withholding sight also forecloses the creation of new visual memories; that is, the hawk can only remember through its other senses, such as taste, which the falconer manipulates to create positive associations with captivity.14 However, seeling is not a permanent state; it is a temporary phase. Some new visions are necessary to replace memories because the hawk must eventually become unseeled to hunt and must be able to view the falconer with 14. Frederick’s treatise instills the necessity of understanding taste and eating as the only place of common ground for humans and hawks: “Proinde restat solum per gustum assuefacere ipsas ad videndum, tangendum et audiendum hominem, cetera que conversantur cum homine” (360.2–5; So then it remains only through taste [falcons] accustom themselves to seeing, touching, and hearing humans, and all the other things that are associated with humans).

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out associating a human face with captivity. Frederick warns that the hawk’s memories of its days in the wild hinder its developing tolerance of humans if new visions are not progressively offered while the bird is partially unseeled by slightly lowering the threads holding up the lower eyelids. To initiate a systematic forgetting of old memories and accretion of new ones, the falconer keeps the hawk awake at night and offers partial views of its surroundings and of the falconer’s face. In this passage, Frederick repeatedly aligns seeing (videre) with remembering (recordare) and not-seeing, or not seeing enough, with forgetfulness (oblivio): Si non vidisset ea in nocte, non esset tantum assuetus ad eandem in crastinum, immo potius recordaretur eorum que viderat, dum esset silvester in campis ante scilicet quam captus esset et ciliatus, quoniam illa longo tempore viderit, et traderet oblivioni ea que parum vidisset. (418.14–18) [If it had not seen [new objects and faces] in the night, it would not be so greatly accustomed to the same things in the morning; in fact, it would instead remember those things which it had seen when it was wild in the field, before, of course, it had been captured and seeled, since it will have seen those things over a long time and it would turn over to forgetfulness those things which it had seen too little.]

The possibility that these distant memories might persist in the hawk’s mind implies an imperative to the falconer to take direct control of the hawk’s remembering and forgetting. For the hawk will see familiar landscapes during the hunt, and the falconer must train the bird to forget former associations with those viewable places and objects so that it retains no memory of its wild state. Thus, new memories must be offered strategically in increasing increments of brightness to train the bird to see what the falconer wants it to see. Once the hawk is partially unseeled, restricting and slowly increasing brightness becomes the falconer’s only measure against the hawk’s precaptivity memory (see fig. 4.2). This detail from folio 136v illustrates the process of unseeling in three phases: first, the falconer snips the sutures on the bird’s eyelids; next, the assistant uses a candle to backlight the falconer’s face (though we must imagine the darkness of the mews, which is not apparent from the light color of the parchment); finally, the hawk is rewarded with food for its calm reaction to the falconer’s dimly backlit face. The function of light and brightness in memory formation is not a subject unique to Frederick’s treatise but derives from a classical foundation for

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FIGURE 4. 2. Detail of folio 136v of De arte venandi cum avibus, l’art de chace des oisiaus, BnF MS Fr 12400. Used with permission from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

memory training, widely known in the Middle Ages and clearly influential on Frederick’s method. Medieval memory discourse states that an abundance of light and brightness is necessary for forming clear memories; seeling operates on the principle that in order to slow memory accretion, one must occlude clear vision by withholding light. Dimness, according to Quintilian, citing Cicero, is unfavorable to clear recollection: to build memories from which one might recollect, one needs “locis quae vel finguntur vel sumuntur” (68; sites, which are imagined or selected), and these sites must be “multis, inlustribus, acribus, insignitis, quae occurrere celeriterque percuter animum possint” (68; multiple, bright, sharp, distinguished, such that they are able to come quickly 15 to mind and to deeply affect the intellect). Falconers do not want hawks to recall their first visions in captivity once they are unseeled, so they prevent that clarity of sight by removing light from the surroundings. Darkness and then small increments of light slowly habituate and manipulate the hawk’s sight and memory to its new surroundings. Withholding light hinders any abrupt or clear visions of its captive surroundings to confuse its memory-­building in captivity. Limiting the light exposure while the sutures are snipped confuses the hawk’s clarity of sight and clarity of memory-building and recall. This hazy vision allows falconers to introduce themselves slowly and without a shock to the hawk’s memory-store: “videbit ea [faciem hominis nec cetera circum 15. Citations to the Russell edition and translation of Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, occur parenthetically in text by page and line number.

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stantia] sub quadam caligine, ut consueverat, et assecurabit se paulatim ad videndum ea” (416.15–16; it will see those things [the human’s face and other things] around it under a fog as it used to, and it will become accustomed little by little to seeing them). In fig. 4.2, the middle phase of the illustration depicts the bird oriented toward the falconer’s face, which the hawk can view because of its partially opened eyelids and which it can begin to imprint in its memory because of the candlelight. The candle is situated behind the bird so as not to stun it by too clear a sudden vision of the falconer’s face. In this way, the process of gradually unseeling overcomes the problem of a wild hawk transplanted in a new environment stunned by light and seeing everything all at once. By controlling the amount of light surrounding the bird, the falconer aims to manipulate the bird’s memory formation and memory recall at this phase in training. Falconers cannot rely on social training, as discussed in chapter 1, and they cannot rely on hawks voluntarily recollecting opportune memories over traumatic ones. Anselm Oelze parses Albertus Magnus’s theory on memory versus recollection, which requires rational thought, a uniquely human trait: nonhuman animals “are incapable of recollecting things. If they remember something, the memory of this object is not brought about by deliberation and quasi-syllogistic process, but is triggered by other powers of their souls, such as appetite. [. . .] Memory in other animals always requires the impulse of another power of the sensory soul and this impulse cannot be controlled voluntarily.”16 Gradual unseeling disciplines the vision-memory circuit to take in sights, which may have previously triggered old memories, without calling up such memories. But when sights are introduced too suddenly, when too much visual stimulus presents itself, or when too much light enters the visual field, old memories collide with new ones. This collision means that the falconer cannot control which memories will prevail. Controlling the degree of light, then, is the only way to bypass an otherwise impulsive system. And, as we have seen, this collision of present captivity and past memories results in self-mutilation, dilacero.

HEURODIS AND THE PROBLEMS OF MEMORY One problem that reading for falconry solves is Heurodis’s rewritten fate in Sir Orfeo. Though Heurodis has been recovered from the fairy world, giving 16. Oelze, Animal Rationality, 174.

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her more narrative time than Eurydice in the classical story, her voice is left behind; she does not speak in the narrative after her second passage to the fairy world, though her forty-four-line speech prior to this moment amounts to more consecutive speaking lines than for any other character. That she also produces no heir for Orfeo’s kingdom means that her recovery from the fairy world does not signify for Orfeo’s narrative of lineage. For what purpose, then, is she recuperated in this adaptation of the Orpheus myth? Approaching her silence through her visions and memories, and the self-mutilation that such memories produce, helps us see how she rejects the fairy king’s training, how she herself trains Orfeo, and how the lay uses the figure of Heurodis to train the reader. The seeling principles laid out in the previous section help make sense of Heurodis’s abduction and her reaction to the fairy world’s excessive brightness. Reading through falconry recasts these details as the fairy king’s failure to manipulate Heurodis’s memory. Though the lay depicts her frantic self-mutilation first and an account of her abduction second, these events occur for Heurodis in reverse order: first she is abducted, and then she harms herself. I suggest that it is her memory that triggers this self-mutilation, and specifically her memory of a fairy world that is similar to her own world but amplified in every way: it is brighter, fuller, and richer than her familiar surroundings. It is at once familiar and strikingly different, and she is shocked into seeing these similarities because of the land’s excessive brightness. The speech following her self-mutilation is almost entirely composed of this memory. Heurodis’s first vision upon entering the fairy world is described in language of excess: the king arrives “wiÞ an hundred kniȝtes & mo, / & damisels an hundred al-so” (143–44; with a hundred knights and more, / and a hundred damsels also). This is, admittedly for Heurodis, more—in both volume and intensity—than she is accustomed to seeing: “Y ne seiȝe neuer ȝete bifore / So faire creatours y-core” (147–48; I never once saw ever before / such elegantly fair creatures). The king’s crown, shining “as briȝt as Þe sonne” (152; as bright as the sun), emblematizes the unrelenting brightness that later characterizes his kingdom. And when she visually assesses the landscape, she is struck by a richness of looking, of seeing everything: “[the fairy king] shewed me castels and tours, / Riuers, forestes, friÞ wiÞ flours, / & his riche stedes ichon” (159–61; the fairy king showed me castles and towers, / rivers, forests, woods with flowers, / and each one of his splendid landholdings). This vision is the last she experiences in the fairy world before being returned to her own court’s orchard. The practice of seeling helps make sense of the perceived brightness pervading the lay’s descriptions of the fairy world: the light stuns Heurodis’s

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vision but ultimately preserves her memory of life before abduction. The narrator describes the irregularity of the fairy world’s brightness, which emanates from seemingly everywhere: Al þat lond was euer liȝt, For when it schuld be þerk & niȝt Þe riche stones liȝt goone As briȝt as doþ at none þe sonne. (369–72) [All that land was always light, / for when it should be dark and night, / the rich stones’ light went on / as bright as the sun does at noon.]

The brightness of the fairy world functions as sudden light does in falconry training: it stuns the viewer into a nostalgic paralysis. As described previously, in falconry some light is necessary, but too much light prompts the viewer to recall memories of life before captivity. These memories associate the past with the present brightness and ultimately cause self-mutilation. Heurodis is blinded by the brightness on an even smaller scale when she views the king’s crown. The brightness temporarily paralyzes her, preventing her from asserting agency when the fairy king takes her; but once back in her orchard, she conveys to Orfeo the danger of the brightness in her recollection and single speech: Þe king hadde a croun on hed; It nas of siluer, no of gold red, Ac it was of a precious ston —As briȝt as þe sonne it schon; & as son as he to me cam, Wold ich nold ich, he me nam. (149–54) [The king had a crown on his head; / it was not of silver, nor of red gold, / but it was of precious stone / —it shone as bright as the sun; / and as soon as he came to me, / whether I wanted or didn’t want, he took me.]

The description of the crown’s blinding brightness is coupled with the moment of Heurodis’s capture by the fairy king. As described by Frederick and Quintilian, bright lights are necessary for memory-building, and, in the case of falconry training, they stun the viewer into permanent and damaging associations: a well-lit object conjures awareness of captivity and nostalgia for a noncaptive past. This aspect of memory and falconry training repositions

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Heurodis’s last line, “wold ich nold ich, he me nam,” to beautifully encapsulate ambivalence about her capture, teetering between paralyzed fear and mesmerized rapture, between present shock and nostalgic memory. As in falconry, the brightness prompts Heurodis to overlay the memory of the past on her present captivity and causes mutilation. In other words, the very artistry of the fairy world, its shining structures and everlasting brightness, contributes to Heurodis’s failure to be seeled, or trained into submission, properly by her captors. The brightness allows her to see too much all at once and prevents her from forgetting what she must forget to assimilate to her new surroundings. The familiar sights Heurodis witnesses in the fairy world are unfamiliar to her in their excessive degree and artificial quality. I have already discussed how Heurodis’s memory of the fairy world is rife with language of excess, indicative of the brightness of the place and its ability to overwhelm the visual sense, which makes memory-building facile and permanent. Communicating to Orfeo the visual richness and specific sights of the fairy world in her single speech conditions him to enter the fairy world with a frame of recognition, and he notices there the same landmarks she has described. The lay’s repetition of visual imagery conveys Heurodis’s training: Orfeo does not see everything in the fairy world; he sees what she has described, planted in his memory, and trained him to recognize. Heurodis describes witnessing “castels & tours, / Riuers, forestes, friÞ wiÞ flours” (159–60). The narrator’s description of what Orfeo has left behind when he ventures into the woods (“castels & tours, / Riuer, forest, friÞ wiÞ flours” [245–46]) reminds readers that the elements of the fairy kingdom described by Heurodis also feature in Orfeo’s own kingdom. What Heurodis has seen in captivity mirrors what she saw in her own land prior to her abduction; thus, the unfamiliar contains something familiar. Orfeo knows to look for, and in fact sees, “a castel” and “an hundred tours” (355; 359) after following the ladies from the river, and Heurodis’s trained hawk leads him to these sights. He distinguishes them from his own familiar castles and towers because of their brightness and artistry, which Heurodis has already described in her account of the fairy world. By preparing him for the unrelenting brightness, Heurodis has trained him to overcome the kind of paralysis she had experienced herself. Until now, I have been arguing that Heurodis has trained Orfeo through the content of her speech. But her physicality also communicates a rejection of the fairy king’s training and a strategy for escaping captivity. Her self-­ mutilation illustrates her resistance to capture; this resistance continues in her single speech, which offers an explanation of her captive surroundings. While the fairyland’s brightness might have imprinted her memory, Heurodis’s last verbal exchange with the fairy king interweaves memory, vision, and the threat

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of mutilation. It is significant that this is Heurodis’s memory of his speech, and not his speech in narrative real time. Thus, the lay introduces Orfeo’s rival via Heurodis’s perception rather than through a narrator’s. Her recollection of his words is filled with fear of violence, suggesting a link between her memory of his threat and her self-mutilating reaction to that threat: Loke, dame, to-morwe þatow be Riȝt here vnder þis ympe-tre, & þan þou schalt wiþ ous go, & liue wiþ ous euer-mo; & ȝif þou makest ous y-let, Whar þou be, þou worst y-fet, & to-tore þine limes al, Þat noþing help þe no schal; & þei þou best so to-torn, Ȝete þou worst wiþ ous y-born. (165–74) [Look, dame, that tomorrow you be / right here under this grafted tree, / and then you shall go with us, / and live with us forever-more; / and if you make a hindrance for us, / wherever you are, you will be taken, / and all your limbs so torn apart, / that nothing shall help you at all; / and though you will be so torn apart, / you will still be taken with us.]

This threat has two parts, both excessive in their gravity. The first part deals directly with duration as excess and the second with mutilation: Heurodis must live with them “euer-mo,” either as a body intact, or “so to-torn,” so dismembered that she would be powerless to resist abduction. This twofold threat causes her to awaken, and “sche froted hir honden & hir fet, / & crached hir visage—it bled wete” (79–80; she wrung her hands and her feet, / and scratched her face—it bled wet). Here, she performs violence on herself before the fairy king can do so. As Suzanne Edwards points out in her discussion of Heurodis’s choice to survive, “while Heurodis cannot do what she wishes, she 17 can nonetheless choose what indignity she will suffer.” Within her limited range of options, she will choose not to outwardly resist abduction, but her self-mutilation demonstrates her inward resistance. Her self-mutilation, when understood as occurring in chronological narrative time adjacent to the fairy king’s threat of violence upon her body, allows us to see how the poem posi 17. Edwards, Afterlives of Rape, 124.

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tions the memory of her vision as the cause of her violent actions.18 Heurodis’s self-mutilation and distinct memory of her capture demonstrate a conscious rejection of the fairy king’s method of controlling her. Her self-mutilation pre-empts the external violence the fairy king has threatened and suggests to Orfeo early on that she will take control even when it appears that she is under control, rendering her actions a subtle subversion of a subjugated position. Heurodis uses her speech and actions to warn Orfeo how to interpret her situation when he encounters her hawking in the fairy world. This subtle assertion of control arises first when Orfeo witnesses Heurodis’s self-mutilation. Orfeo describes her “bodi” “to-tore” by her nails, her fingers bloodied, and her changed eyes and expression (105–12), and the description bears a strong resemblance to that of a hawk rebelling against captivity, breaking off (disrumpo) its feathers, rending (dilacero) its eyelids, and holding humans in hatred (odio): Þi bodi, þat was so white y-core, Wiþ þine nailes is al to-tore. Allas! Þi rode, þat was so red, Is al wan, as þou were ded; & al-so þine fingres smale Beþ al blodi & al pale. Allas! Þi louesom eyȝen to Lokeþ so man doþ his fo! (105–12) [Your body that was so elegantly white / is all so torn by your nails. / Alas! Your complexion that was so red / is all pale, as if you were dead; / and your small fingers / also are all bloody and pale. / Alas! Your two loving eyes / look as man does upon his foe!]

Orfeo’s observation of her changed countenance bears strong resemblance to Frederick’s warning about a hawk who has formed a hatred for humans, and the last two lines even recall the “visum faciei humane” (342.6–7; sight 18. While I argue that the self-mutilation in this scene is part of a formal training process in the structure of the lay, other scholars have interpreted these actions in narrative terms: either as protection from chastity or as signs of madness. For example, Ellen M. Caldwell calls on critics such as Jane Tibbets Schulenburg to discuss Heurodis’s self-mutilation in light of female saints and women religious who sought to preserve their chastity and purity for Christ at all costs (Caldwell, “Heroism of Heurodis,” 295). On the topic of Heurodis’s madness, see, for example, Falk, “Son of Orfeo”; Kendall, “Family, Familia, and the Uncanny in Sir Orfeo”; Spearing, “Sir Orfeo”; and Pearsall, “Madness in Sir Orfeo.”

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of a human face) that unseeled eyes would take in, a sight which produces that hatred. This description of Heurodis’s self-inflicted violence perceived and voiced by Orfeo registers within the lay for Heurodis, who will repeat the key word “to-tore” twice in her speech to Orfeo (171, 173). She repeats this word not to describe her self-mutilation but to describe her imminent inflicted mutilation by the fairy king. Here, her repetition of this term directs Orfeo’s attention to her double bind: like a captive bird, she “tears” herself before the fairy king could complete his threat of “tearing” her. She presents her dilemma in falconry terms, signaling to Orfeo early on to associate the training of falcons with her own abduction. Her self-inflicted violence, at first illegible to Orfeo, ultimately demonstrates her refusal to submit to her abductor’s attempt to disassociate her from her previous life. When taken together with her speech, her mutilation communicates to Orfeo her subtle resistance to the fairy king, whose attempt to control her has failed. Falconry, which warns against this kind of reaction to poor training, is not only allegorical for this scene of mutilation but later employed literally at a crucial diegetic moment in Sir Orfeo: the event of Heurodis hawking coincides with the moment of recognition between her and Orfeo after ten years of separation. At this point in the narrative, Heurodis’s interiority is no longer represented, but this silence is not to be confused with lack of self-control. Rather, the lay directs readers to Orfeo to demonstrate Heurodis’s effect on Orfeo’s sight and memory. Here, Heurodis is positioned as the falconer in control of her own subjects: a hawk and the attention of her wandering husband, whose vision of falconry leads him to catch sight of Heurodis and regain his purpose. This moment in the lay focuses on Orfeo’s sight and movement as he follows the hawking women: And on a day he seiȝ him biside Sexti leuedis on hors ride, Gentil & iolif as brid on ris; Nouȝt o man amonges hem þer nis; & ich a faucoun on hond bere, And riden on haukin bi o riuere. Of game þai founde wel gode haunt, Maulardes, hayroun & cormeraunt; Þe foules of þe water ariseþ, Þe faucouns hem wele deuiseþ; Ich faucoun his pray slouȝ. Þat seiȝe Orfeo, & louȝ: ‘Parfay!’ quaþ he, ‘Þer is fair game;

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Þider ichil, bi Godes name! Ich was y-won swiche werk to se.’ (303–17) [And on a day he saw beside / him sixty ladies ride on horseback, / noble and jolly as a bird on wing; / not a single man is among them; / and each bore a hawk on hand, / and they ride hawking by the river. / They found a very good gathering of birds for game: / mallards, heron, and cormorant; / the birds arise from the water and the falcons observe them well; / each hawk slew its prey. / Orfeo saw that and laughed: / “By my faith!” he says, “There is fair game; / I’ll go there, by God’s name! / I was accustomed to see such things.”]

In this passage the poem sets up Orfeo’s recognition of hawking in anticipation of the mutual recognition between the two. The first thing Orfeo sees is the work of the hawk, and then, through that familiar work, he “biheld” and “vnder-nome” Heurodis. When Orfeo exclaims “Ich was y-won swiche werk to se” (317), he exhibits how one might “remember with and through craft.”19 He is not only accustomed to seeing falcons being flown, he is accustomed to seeing the work of Heurodis’s training because the falconry birds evoke his conversation with her, her warnings to him, and her self-mutilating behavior. The ensuing scene is rife with looking verbs, which create a parallel to the initial description of Heurodis’s self-mutilation. After witnessing Heurodis’s and the other ladies’ successfully trained hawks, He aros & þider gan te. To a leuedi he was y-come, Biheld, & haþ wele vnder-nome, & seþ bi al þing þat it is His owhen quen, Dam Heurodis. Ȝern he biheld hir, & sche him eke, Ac noiþer to oþer a word no speke. For messais þat sche on him seiȝe, Þat had ben so riche & so heiȝe. Þe teres fel out of her eiȝe: Þe oþer leuedis þis y-seiȝe & maked hir oway to ride —Sche most wiþ him no lenger abide. (318–30)

19. Cooper, “Crafting Memory,” 190.

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[He arose and began to go there. / He came to a lady, / beheld her, and has taken her in well, / and sees by all things that it is / his own queen, Dame Heurodis. / Longingly he beheld her, and she him also, / but neither spoke a single word to the other. / For the hardship that she saw in him, / who had been so rich and so exalted, / the tears fell out of her eye: / the other ladies saw this / and made her ride away / —she must no longer abide with him.]

This recognition scene uses six looking verbs to create a multilayered structure: the couple’s private and chiastic beholding is disrupted by the other ladies seeing the couple look upon one another. First Orfeo “biheld” and “wele vnder-nome” and “seþ” Heurodis (320–21); then “he biheld hir, & sche him eke” (323); and finally, “sche” “seiȝe” his hardship (325) before the other ladies “þis y-seiȝe” and whisk her away (328). The intense vision imagery here evokes the initial abduction scene, prompting recollection for the reader. In the first abduction scene, Orfeo looked upon Heurodis’s marred body, and here Heurodis observes Orfeo’s degraded state just as he first saw hers, and then Orfeo watches Heurodis being abducted a second time, compressing the memory of the first scene into this parallel one. Despite reciprocated beholding, they do not speak, and it is not clear why; yet an answer to this silence lies in an alternative channel of communication, that of falconry and memory training. Heurodis’s previous speech has already conditioned Orfeo to consider her an untrainable woman aware of the fairy king’s method for assimilating new subjects: excessive brightness and uncontrolled mutilation. Lewis J. Owen has taken issue with A. J. Bliss’s punctuation of the recognition passage: “Ac noiþer to oþer a word no speke, / For messais þat sche on him seiȝe” (324–25). Bliss’s comma at the end of line 324 creates a causal relationship between the “messais” (hardship) that Heurodis observes and the mutual silence in the previous line. Owen’s period at the end of line 324 severs the causality: “Ac noiþer to oþer a word no speke. / For messais þat sche on him seiȝe.”20 This punctuational substitution allows Owen to argue that it is not grief over Orfeo’s pitiable state that prevents Heurodis from speaking at this moment, nor is it pity for her tears that makes the ladies whisk her away. Instead, Owen argues that it is Orfeo’s decisive action to violate his earlier vow of never seeing a woman that allows the recognition, but the fairy enchantment still persists and prevents communication between the two. According to Owen, the hawking scene allows Orfeo to recognize victory—the falcons take their prey and inspire action in Orfeo. But as I’ve been arguing, the hawking scene does more than communicate some 20. Owen, “Recognition Scene in ‘Sir Orfeo,’” 251.

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thing about Orfeo. The critical tendency to focus on the lay’s male protagonist has overshadowed the obvious: Heurodis’s actions as a falconer demonstrate agency, self-possession, and prowess. Heurodis’s trained hawk triggers something for Orfeo in which they both participate. Their mutual silence might not be imposed on them by a fairy enchantment as much as it partakes in a calculated patience, which a culture of training supports. Since, as Owen has pointed out, guarding or recovering Heurodis by force has no effect on the fairy threat, the two must use a different tactic. Their tacit agreement, reinforced by the intensity of their visual exchanges, suggests that the answer to her recovery lies in memory training—Orfeo must remember that which Heurodis had described to him about the contours of the fairy world’s topography, and Heurodis must remember her former life outside the fairy world.

HAWKING HEURODIS It is tempting to read the hawking episode as parallel to the structure of the recovery narrative: just as her hawk was cast from her arm, caught its game, and returned to its master, Heurodis herself seems to have been trained by, flown from, and called back to her husband successfully. But Sir Orfeo presents a compelling case for overturning readers’ expectations of a training metaphor, for this poem specifically casts the female protagonist in the role of the falconer. Through her prowess as a falconer, Heurodis likewise overturns “the common view of romance plots as stories of knights saving damsels in 21 distress.” Here, a woman is represented not only with a hawk on her arm as an ornament but with reported mastery of the art. Similar descriptions appear in earlier romances. For example, the Ovide Moralisé’s Philomena imbues its titular character with both the knowledge to train various types of hawks and the desire to practice falconry all the time: D’espreviers sot et de faucons Et del jantil et del lanier; Bien sot feire un faucon muiier Et un ostor et un tercuel Ne ja ne fuste ele son vuel 22 S’an gibier non ou an riviere. (182–87) 21. Simpson, “Cognition Is Recognition,” 29. 22. This quotation from Philomena is cited by line number from the Boer edition, which assigns authorship to Chrétien de Troyes. My translation.

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[She knew about sparrowhawks and falcons, / and about the true noble hawk and the lanner. / She knew well how to mew a hawk / and a goshawk and a tiercel. / She would never willingly be anywhere / but hawking or waterfowling [flying falcons at waterfowl].]

This description suggests the possibility that educated women not only apprehended all they read about training falcons and hawks but could also be passionately dedicated to the practice of hawking. Sir Orfeo offers a description of this knowledge employed in practice, encouraging a more complex readerly engagement with Heurodis as a falconer. At the same time, because of Heurodis’s self-mutilation triggered by memory, the poem also furnishes a reading of Heurodis as undergoing a memory manipulation similar to that of a trained hawk. Where Heurodis’s hawk saw and caught game with none of the adverse effects of training described in Frederick’s treatise, Heurodis herself exhibits the traits of a poorly seeled hawk: she sees familiar sights while in captivity, scratches her face, attempts to flee from her handler the fairy king, and suffers from disturbing memories. By depicting the fairy king’s failed seeling operation on Heurodis, and Heurodis’s implicitly successful seeling of her hawk, the poem casts Heurodis as the authoritative falconer with particular expertise in memory training, and these training methods extend to Orfeo. In a culture approaching the rise of “conduct books” that “present intangible virtues (not particular acts) of worthy figures for ethical imitation,” we might view the notion of training with skepticism.23 Holly Crocker suggests that in their instruction on women’s ethical rules, these books “dematerialize virtue, [making] it into a set of principles that can never be fully embodied.”24 They do this by “separating [particular virtues] from the specific conditions of their emergence.”25 But the manuals informing Heurodis’s falconry training are not ostensibly concerned with human exemplarity, courtesy, or spirituality, as Crocker notes of conduct books. Yet they nevertheless partake in and shape the same culture of training, without the problems of disembodiment that Crocker finds in the gendered training culture of conduct books. In their ultimate goal of accommodating the hawk’s body to prevent it from fleeing, falconry manuals promote human virtues outside the purview of conduct manuals. In their minute attunements to the material connection between hawk and human bodies, falconry manuals provide just such particularity that conduct manuals eschew. In so doing, they offer the opportunity for women as well as men to ground their behavior in a training not apparently meant to 23. Crocker, Matter of Virtue, 12. 24. Crocker, Matter of Virtue, 12. 25. Crocker, Matter of Virtue, 12.

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abstract or police their own human conduct but nevertheless influencing their own bodily gestures and perceptions of their surroundings. A falconry training approach to the moment that enables Heurodis’s recovery, the hawking-recognition scene, makes sense of her silence and her prior instruction to Orfeo in her speech. Heurodis uses “her silent gaze of recognition [to save] the knight.”26 But it is not only her “silent gaze” that Heurodis employs at this crucial moment; her trained hawk evokes the tenets of seeling to enable a very specific kind of recognition. Heurodis’s captive bird reacts as a properly trained hawk should: it sees what Heurodis wants it to see and returns to her fist. Despite the lay’s depiction of Heurodis as a falconer, critical attention to the hawking scene elides her active role. Within the narrative, this makes sense; after all, Orfeo does not immediately recognize Heurodis among the hawking women, so critics have tended to focus on what the scene communicates about Orfeo. For example, David Salter discusses the hawking scene to make an association between falconry and Orfeo’s royal upbringing: “the sight of the falcons hunting their prey actually enables Orfeo to recover or rediscover within himself his own aristocratic identity. [. . .] His delight in falconry can be seen as a trait that corresponds to, or is indicative of, his identity as a noble king.”27 But in the metanarrative I am tracing, Heurodis’s prior speech and self-mutilation have prepared Orfeo to associate the fairy world with falconry training even before they behold one another. The lay gives Orfeo other opportunities to observe other hunting parties that might have evoked his “aristocratic identity.” Attending to the fact that Heurodis is the only named character executing a successful hunt suggests that it is her hawking prowess specifically that enables Orfeo to remember according to the training Heurodis has employed on him and her hawk. Though Orfeo witnesses “þe king o fairy wiþ his rout / com to hunt him al about” (283–84; the king of fairies with his crowd / come to hunt all around him), “no best þai no nome” (286; they took no game). Unlike the unsuccessful fairy king and his entourage with their “dim cri & bloweing, / & houndes also wiþ him berking” (285–86; faint cry and horn-blowing, / and barking hounds with him, too), Heurodis and her female “rout” do take game—a lot of game. The sixty falcons, in this moment, are not stunned by the brightness of aere claro: in other words, they don’t see everything; they only see what Heurodis and the other falconers have directed them to see: the waterfowl arising from the river. But the training also extends to Orfeo, who does not see everything; he sees what she has set in motion for him to see and recalls what she has conditioned him to remember. 26. Simpson, “Cognition Is Recognition,” 29. 27. Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts, 105.

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Heurodis’s hawk becomes the visual marker of a training process that Heurodis has employed on Orfeo because she has conditioned him to associate her with a falconry bird at the point of capture: she is lured by songbirds into the orchard (68), abducted by the fairy king, stunned by his brightness, and prompted by memory of her abduction to rend her face and feet in the manner of a poorly seeled hawk (77–80). This association specifically enables Orfeo to follow the flight of her hawk back to her glove and similarly look back into his memory and recuperate his sanity and purpose and, finally, Heurodis herself.28 The poem further encourages a degree of substitutability between the hawk and Heurodis when it uses the verb “aliȝt” to describe Heurodis’s movement. This word was used to describe the arrival of a person or descent of a bird.29 Following Heurodis’s hawk from the pitch of its flight to its prey, to its falconer Heurodis, through the forest, by the towers, among the light-giving stones, Orfeo recognizes the hawking women as if they were birds themselves: “In þis castel þe leuedis aliȝt” (377). The poem takes full advantage of the verb’s dual-species application when it depicts the arrival of ladies who have just had birds alight on their gloves. Heurodis even competes with Orfeo in conveying the proper way to see, recall, and react. Edwards discusses the difference between Orfeo and Heurodis in terms of their divergent understandings of nuanced control: where Heurodis’s speech blurs “an easy opposition between sovereignty and subordination,” Orfeo initially views “sovereignty as incompatible with any 30 concessions to circumstance.” Orfeo’s modus operandi, apparent in his abandonment of his kingdom and rash oath, demonstrates improper control over memory. His painful memories of losing Heurodis provoke him to swear off seeing any woman, effectively blinding himself in order to assuage that memory: “For now ichaue mi quen y-lore, / Þe fairest leuedi þat euer was bore, / Neuer eft y nil no woman se” (209–11; for now that I have lost my queen, / the fairest lady that was ever born, / never again will I see any woman at all). Orfeo swears that he will never see any woman upon losing his queen; his tactic is too finite and permanent. Heurodis’s mode of seeling, Orfeo discovers at the river in his encounter with her bird, does not require him to see nothing, to see no woman ever, just the one right thing, just one woman: Heurodis. Edwards argues that Heurodis’s acquiescence to her abduction is “the poem’s ethical center” and thus responds to Orfeo’s ethical and political “crisis of agency”: Heurodis teaches him to “perfor[m] the willing embrace of limits 28. Similarly, Edwards observes Heurodis’s training of Orfeo operative in his restoration to the throne: “Heurodis’s survival of ravishment [is] a model for Orfeo’s royal return” (127). 29. MED, s.v. “alighten” (v.1.2a, 2b). 30. Edwards, Afterlives of Rape, 125.

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on his freedom, accepting his vulnerability just as Heurodis did.”31 I believe the concept of seeling, of training a subject to see and to remember only that which the trainer desires, posits Heurodis’s flying her hawk as the culmination of her training of Orfeo. The final section of this chapter discusses how this training extends to the reader of the Orpheus retelling.

LOOKING BACK TO EURYDICE In chapter 1, I examined Frederick II’s De arte venandi cum avibus to posit falconry as a poetics of control in reading practice. This chapter has refocused this reading practice by returning to Frederick’s treatise, which describes controlled flight as dependent on seeling the hawk, and then unseeling to eventually grant it full sight. As established, seeling trains the hawk to build a certain kind of memory-store so that, upon being flown in the open, it will not see everything and thus not remember everything from its wild past. In reading practice, I posit that a poem’s figurative seeling of the reader’s eyes prevented them from looking back to a complete memory-store of Latin sources to enable an alteration of the memory of those sources. In this respect, seeling trained readers to create space in their memories for something new even when they look upon something familiar. I’m not suggesting that a medieval poem like Sir Orfeo erases the traces of the classical source entirely; rather, seeling in reading practice controls what readers recall by producing an accumulative, and selective, effacement: building something new on the effaced memories of something old. But the physical mutilation attendant upon seeling reminds readers that this erasure leaves scars that are legible through Heurodis’s marred body, strategic speech, and control of herself and her hawk. Though Heurodis’s silence in the fairy world may have been part of a recovery operation, her conspicuous lack of speaking lines once she returns to her own kingdom does not seem to serve the same purpose. Instead, I argue in concluding this chapter that Heurodis’s silence solves the problem of the lay’s most striking alteration of the classical Orpheus myth. The Orpheus myth culminates in a disastrous looking back, when Orpheus can’t resist looking back into his memory, prompting him to violate the one law governing his successful removal of Eurydice from the Underworld: to not look back at his bride. The fairy king places no condition on Orfeo to not look back as he guides his beloved out of captivity. Readers’ anticipation of this moment sets up an expectation for some kind of looking back. Through the figure of Heu 31. Edwards, Afterlives of Rape, 127; 125; 128.

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rodis, the lay trains the reader to look back in a way that recuperates Eurydice from her second descent. As I’ve argued in this chapter, falconry features at a turning point in this adaptation: Orfeo recognizes Heurodis and recovers her from the fairy world. Orfeo doesn’t lose Heurodis and doesn’t repeat mythological Orpheus’s, and thus Eurydice’s, scripted fate. Simpson has argued that this lay evinces a “model for interpretive recognition”: the moment in which Orfeo recognizes Heurodis allows the reader to recognize this poem as a lay that will evoke disaster but ultimately sidestep it, as designated by “the rules of the generic game” and the reader’s knowledge of romance narrative formulae. 32 For Simpson, recognition and memory work together in training the reader to decode a generic structure. But I believe that the recognition and training required of the audience in the recognition scene operate both within the lay itself and across different generic versions of the Orpheus story. Seeling as reading practice not only trains readers of the adaptation but directs them to look back selectively into a literary memory. In the case of Sir Orfeo, Heurodis’s self-mutilation, speech, and silence direct readers to look back to Eurydice from the classical myth. The expression “to look back” as a figurative concept for memory relies on a visual object that one turns toward to view in one’s mind. By drawing from classical source material, medieval poems encourage a figurative looking back at literary objects imprinted in readers’ memories. In the Orpheus myth, a story widely diffused in medieval literary culture, the orphic “looking back” is also a diegetic set piece. Anke Bernau examines Robert Henryson’s fifteenthcentury retelling of the Orpheus myth, but her assessment of memory is relevant to any version of the narrative in which Orpheus looks back: “What is behind him—Eurydice herself, but also his memories of her—overtakes what still lies before him: the path out of hell, and the vow connected to it. Orpheus errs on the threshold between two places, which demand two different kinds of memory, because he cannot privilege the right memory in the right place, at 33 the right time.” Orfeo looks back in his mind’s eye and then with his physical eyes. As I’ve shown, in falconry training, memory and physicality operate in the reverse sequence: seeling trains the subject to look at familiar sights without looking back into a memory-store. To understand how seeling operates outside the narrative in reading practice, it is helpful to look at the frame of the poem, before readers are introduced to Orfeo and Heurodis. The first few lines of the lay set up seeing and 32. Simpson, “Cognition Is Recognition,” 34. 33. Bernau, “Memory,” 35.

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saying as related, and as possibly interchangeable. This relationship encourages readers to later interpret Heurodis’s silence as legible through sight and memory, thus reclaiming a voice for her that has been critically overlooked. In chapter 3, I discussed the relationship between looking and reading in Yonec, and Marie de France’s call to readers to gloss by looking as well as by reading.34 In Sir Orfeo, looking recuperates speaking from a seemingly silenced Heurodis. The lay begins “We redeþ oft & findeþ [y-write],” setting up reading and finding as separate but related activities. What interests me more, however, are lines 12 and 13 in the Auchinleck Manuscript: “Of al þinges þat men seþ / mest o loue, for-soþe, þai beþ” (Of all things that men see [or say], / they must truly be most about love). Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury gloss “seþ” as “relate,” as in “seien” (to say),35 though Bliss glosses the word as the present third-person plural form of the verb “se,” to see, and other instances of “seþ” also point to this definition of the word.36 Another version of Sir Orfeo in MS Harley 3810 offers a similar use of the verb in line 11: “Of alle þing þat men may se.” But MS Ashmole 61’s witness of the poem demonstrates a slight alteration in its line 17, by employing two verbs, “here” and “se”: “Off alle þe venturrys men here or se.”37 By augmenting the scope of this line to include two verbs, with two possible definitions for the second verb, this version of the lay makes apparent what was latent in the other two versions: there are two possible interpretations for “se,” which are not mutually exclusive. The line could read “Of all the adventures men hear or see” or “Of all the adventures men hear or say.” Such a double interpretation would overlay the act of seeing with the act of saying or speaking, or, as Laskaya and Salisbury have it, relating. In other words, while a speaker relates a song to an audience, the audience not only hears but sees, as in visualizes, the adventure, relating song to memory through vision. Heurodis’s memory—exposed to readers in a description of self-mutilation—thus exteriorizes the unsung suffering of her classical predecessor, Eurydice.

34. The overlap between Marie de France’s lais and the opening lines of Sir Orfeo enjoys a rich critical history. Because the prologue to Sir Orfeo is missing and is presumed to be identical to and even to provide the original text for the opening of Lay le Freyne in the same manuscript, critics have queried the relationship between the two lays. Lay le Freyne is a translation of Marie’s lai of the same name, but Marie’s version “contains nothing corresponding to the prologue” (Bliss xlvi). 35. Sir Orfeo, ed. Laskaya and Salisbury, 26. 36. In Bliss’s glossary, “seþ” from line 11 of the Auchinleck version is listed as the present plural conjugation of “se, v. to see” (70). His glossary also lists “seþ” as “to see” in lines 251 and 321. 37. The Harley 3810 and Ashmole 61 versions of Sir Orfeo are listed below the Auchinleck version in the Bliss edition, pages 2–3 for lines cited here.

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David McInnis also looks to the mutilation in the lay to connect it to its classical source but, like many critics, uses this connection to focus on the male protagonist and, in so doing, reduces the experiences of female characters in both classical and medieval versions of the myth to a structural role. He strings together Heurodis’s self-mutilation, her account of the threat of dismemberment, and Orfeo’s invented story about finding the king dismembered in the forest to suggest that the poem recreates “Orpheus’s demise by sparagmós (ritualistic dismemberment)” from the Ovidian source. All of these references to dismemberment build up, only to later deflate, the “expectation that Orfeo will meet a similar, predestined fate.”38 McInnis uses this unrealized narrative to suggest a larger persistent “[haunting] by absent narratives never quite realised in the text” of the lay, but he refers to the absent narrative 39 of Orpheus alone. Instead, I believe the lay operates conversely from its sources: that is, it uses details about Heurodis to realize an absent and haunting narrative about the female protagonist in the classical myth. In classical versions of the Orpheus story, Eurydice is a shade among shades, fallen into the dark Underworld. Though Virgil’s and Boethius’s versions of the myth refer to the “umbras” of the Underworld, Ovid’s is the version that most explicitly envelops Eurydice in darkness.40 When called to rejoin Orpheus, Ovid’s Eurydice “umbras erat illa recentes inter” (X.48–49; was among the new shades [67]).41 Conversely, in Sir Orfeo, Heurodis is a living fleshly body abducted to a fairy world marked by perpetual brightness. Though she finds herself among the graphically rent but undead bodies under the “ympe-tre” (407), she never becomes a shade made of darkness. The fact that Heurodis was taken to a fairy world while still living suggests that memories from her life in Orfeo’s world might persist. In terms of memory training, the lack of darkness in the fairy world makes it more difficult for her to forget her life on the other side. The stability of her identity, residing in her accessible memory and induced by perpetual light, remains in the fairy world when it should have been forgotten. Heurodis’s body is made of “bodi & bones” (54), and she marks it up and mutilates it so that it is a visual marker of this problem of remembering and seeing too much, the very problem Eurydice encounters at her near breach of the Underworld. Eurydice almost regains her former life, is invited to see 38. McInnis, “Sparagmós Averted,” 35. 39. McInnis, “Sparagmós Averted,” 39. 40. Virgil, Fourth Georgic, page 176, line 20; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, Book 3, Metrum 12, line 41. 41. Citations to the Loeb edition of Metamorphoses occur parenthetically in text by book number and line number and are followed by Miller’s translation and page number.

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Orpheus and to remember what she had forgotten in the river Styx, and then must painfully lose it again. Sir Orfeo’s adaptation and alteration of the myth thus offer a way for readers to understand mythological Eurydice’s loss. Heurodis’s abduction and mutilation work out what it must have been like for Eurydice to be recovered, to be reminded of a life she had forgotten, and then to be forced to let go all over again. The medieval rendition does this by representing Heurodis as abducted and driven to self-mutilation by the confluence of the immediate memory of her abduction, the long-term memory of her life with Orfeo, and the threat of losing that life. Bernau discusses Orpheus’s problem in the myth as one of memory. Though the problem she discusses is with Orpheus’s own struggle to balance his memory of Eurydice with the “vow connected to” “the path out of hell,” I posit that traditional renditions of the myth portray Eurydice as the one to pay the immediate physical price.42 If Orpheus’s problem is looking back with his memory and looking back with his eyes, Eurydice embodies that backwards movement with her physical path from the breach between the worlds backwards and downwards: Hic, ne deficeret, metuens avidusque videndi flexit amans oculos, et protinus ill relapsa est, bracciaque intendens prendique et prendere certans nil nisi cedentes infelix arripit auras. iamque iterum moriens non est de coniuge quicquam questa suo (quid enim nisi se quereretur amatam?) supremumque “vale,” quod iam vix auribus ille acciperet, dixit revolutaque rursus eodem est. (Ovid X.56–63) [He, afraid that she might fail him, eager for sight of her, turned back his longing eyes; and instantly she slipped into the depths. He stretched out his arms, eager to catch her or to feel her clasp; but, unhappy one, he clasped nothing but the yielding air. And now, dying a second time, she made no complaint against her husband; for of what could she complain save that she was beloved? She spake one last “farewell” which scarcely reached her husband’s ears and fell back again to the place whence she had come.] (Miller 69)

Though the Metamorphoses thereafter depicts the effect of this double loss on Orpheus, readers of Sir Orfeo understand Eurydice’s second fall through Heurodis, who continues to accompany the protagonist to the conclusion of 42. Bernau, “Memory,” 35.

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the lay. Ovidian Eurydice’s voice is heard, but just barely, and maybe not even by him for whom she intended it. Her reaching voice is all that Orpheus takes with him, and this voice is what pervades the lay of Sir Orfeo, while the rest of her falls to darkness. Yet, reading her darkness through the stunning brightness of Heurodis’s abduction, Eurydice’s voice reaches beyond Orpheus and toward a feminist poetics at the heart of Heurodis’s speech and actions in the poem. Eurydice’s fall and Heurodis’s self-mutilation demonstrate how women exert ethical control from below, even at the expense of their own bodies. Crocker shows how the material sacrifices of female characters break down the opposition of the “dominant/submissive gender contract” and recuperate agency from perceived passivity: “The virtues of femininity—those that accrue to the suffering female body—are imagined as a complement to those of hardheaded, and hardhearted, masculinity.”43 And this ethical control is not limited to the male characters with which they share manuscript space but extends to readers as well. This Auchinleck lay allows readers to visualize Heurodis meeting Eurydice in an under- and otherworld where memory both raises one up and weighs one down. Heurodis’s self-mutilation and speech, which are all part of her recounted memory, create an alternative to the place to which she has been abducted and an alternative to the place where Eurydice resides: the memory-store of the reader. Heurodis’s mutilation and the speech that ensues expose the brightness of the fairy world as a failed attempt to blind her into forgetting her unconfined past. In exposing this failed method of seeling, she frees space to establish her own memory training, and she begins to do so with her speech, with this new linguistic structure that makes use of the memory created by her mutilated body, the memory in which her literary foremother Eurydice resides, and the memory through which she conducts Sir Orfeo’s readers.

43. Crocker, Matter of Virtue, 268; 254.

CHAPTER 5

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Mewing Molting the Literary Trope of the Changeable Woman in Adultery Narratives

Falconers keep the feathers that their birds molt. They do so not for sentimental hoarding but as a preventive measure. This cache of molted feathers becomes a toolkit for repairing any plumage broken later: they imp the old feathers onto the broken feather shaft, sometimes using feathers of one species on another. In this way, the new flight feathers may contain a recycled vestige of the bird’s former plumage or of another deceased or wild bird— feathers picked up in the forest, in another mews, even in another land. This plumage-borrowing and imping structurally resembles the act of literary borrowing across texts, genres, languages, and generations. As discussed in the previous chapter, when poets retell familiar stories, they contend with readers’ lingering memory of a prior narrative, but the control of smaller, fragmentary forms, like the borrowing of literary tropes and metaphors, affords even greater opportunity for poetic revision and subversion. This chapter takes a slightly different path than the previous ones; in the spirit of molted and imped feathers, it follows the threads of different genres, languages, and eras to re-examine the seams of an overtly misogynous literary trope. The literary trope of the changeable woman imagined as a molting or “mewing” hawk occurs over the span of several hundred years and several genres of medieval narrative poetry. Just as the falconer keeps the molted feathers of one bird to imp onto the broken feathers of another, there is a tantalizing purposefulness to the recasting of an old metaphor onto diverse literary characters. We shall • 133 •

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see how the structural makeup of the mewed hawk metaphor and its repeated use from Chrétien to fabliau to Machaut to Chaucer portend ambivalence about adulterous women; the expression conveys both control over and defiance by female characters in adultery narratives, figuring a feminist resistance built into the adultery narrative’s misogynous cast. The metaphor of the mewed hawk seems to reinforce a standard antifeminist agenda: it appears to align a female beloved with a molting hawk to forewarn the male lover/falconer about the bird’s eventual faithlessness once it emerges from the mews. In falconry, mewing works as follows: during their yearly molt, hawks are “ikept in mews þat þey may be discharged of olde federis and harde and be so renewed in fayrenesse of ȝouthe” (kept in mews so that they can be discharged of old feathers and become hard and so renewed 1 to the fairness of youth). The changed feathers are not the anxious source of changeability in the bird; instead, it is their changed behavior that alarms falconers: after such extended time in enclosure, the birds “obliti sunt amorem quem habebant in loyrum, propter hoc non libenter veniunt ad loyrym” (972.15–16; [forget] the love that they had for the lure, and because of this they don’t come [to the falconer] willingly).2 Thus, though a previously obedient hawk will emerge from the mews with a newly generated set of flight and down feathers, it might very well use those feathers to fly of its own accord rather than return to the lure of the falconer. The bird’s desire to fly free after months of confinement without the falconer’s training to the glove is a source of anxiety for falconers, and this anxiety is translated into the narrative poetry that uses the mewing metaphor to depict adulterous women. The revisionist approach I locate in the trope’s literary history finds sympathy with Eve Sedgwick’s proposal that “the richest reparative practices” might develop from “the most paranoid-tending” positions. She derives this idea from Melanie Klein’s parsing of people as paranoid or reparative, terms Sedgwick revises, in a metacritical reparative moment: “it is not people but mutable positions—or, I would want to say, practices—that can be divided between the paranoid and reparative.”3 The large-scale “weaving of intertextual discourse”4 from which paranoid practices are formed might itself contain the swinging door between a paranoid “antifeminist stance” and a reparative “conciliatory practice.”5 In other words, adultery narratives are intertextual 1. Trevisa, On the Properties of Things, 608. 2. Citations to the Budriesi edition of Frederick II, De arte venandi cum avibus, occur parenthetically in text by page and line number. Translations are my own. 3. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 150. 4. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 150. 5. Johnson, “Women on Top,” 306–7.

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in that they borrow and travel across genres, courts, languages; they seem to form the paranoid practice of interpreting women as adulterous and adultery as essentially feminine, but their very intertextuality contains a common trope that offers a means for reparation. The process of mewing—a “mutable” “practic[e]” in its own right—is particularly suitable for troubling a strictly antifeminist interpretation in a seemingly misogynous narrative.6 The mewing metaphor is germane because its falconry-specific kind of change can be divided into conflicting components: a changing external form of feathers and an unchanging form of bodily work beneath those feathers. Upon closer examination of this metaphor in operation, we shall see that mewing is not about change at all but about a kind of fidelity in relation to oneself, based on renewing what was always there. When external plumage renewal is employed to signify the nature of a woman’s heart, the women in these texts speak on this slippage; the metaphor begins to lose ground, and the misogynous framework begins to fall apart.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER IN CLIGÈS The narrative tradition of falconry-love metaphors reaches back to Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century. Chrétien’s Cligès presents a conventional approach to the metaphorical relationship between women and hawks, signaled by Fenice’s avian name (Phoenix) and the multiple falconry birds that stand in for her body when she commits adultery with her husband’s nephew, Cligès. While Chrétien’s romance uses a mewing hawk to enable an adulterous union, it uses a deserter hawk to bring about an end to the lovers’ secrecy. After hiding the convalescent Fenice, Cligès places a molting goshawk alongside her, effectively rendering their shared space a mews, and he uses the bird as an excuse to frequent the enclosure. Fenice’s desire to emerge from her confinement into an orchard causes the lovers to be discovered when a different bird—a fugitive sparrowhawk—alights on a tree beside them. In search of his missing sparrowhawk, an austringer discovers the naked lovers mid-embrace. Hawks, and the men who attempt to control them, surround and stand in for Fenice in this romance. Chrétien’s foundational work establishes a relationship between the dangers of enclosing hawks and the dangers of enclosing women: the mews, a controlled space of enclosure, produces resistance to control in the birds once they exit that space.



6. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 150.

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Cligès’s placement of the goshawk in the tower with Fenice justifies their proximity in space within this scene, but the specification of the goshawk as mewing creates a substitutive, metaphorical relationship between bird and woman in the narrative as a whole. Though the description makes no direct comparison between Fenice and the hawk, this passage clearly symbolizes the lady with the avian name (phoenix) as the bird with the molting feathers: Cligès va en la tor et vient Hardïemant, tot a veüe, C’un ostor i a mis en mue, Si dit que il le vet veoir, Ne nus ne puet aparcevoir Qu’il i voist por nule acheison 7 Se por l’ostor seulemant non. (6298–304) [Cligès goes to the tower and comes / boldly, in full view, / for he has placed a molting goshawk there, / and he says that he goes to see it, / nor can anyone observe / that he might come there for any reason / other than for the goshawk.]

The rhymed couplets in this passage foreground the mewing reference, pairing “tot a veüe” (in full view) with “mis en mue.” The goshawk’s status as “en mue,” or “in molt,” means that its body is renewing its feathers and is thus vulnerable and in need of a protective enclosure, the mews. But the reason Cligès must attend the molting bird has nothing to do with the bird’s safety and everything to do with a falconer’s prescriptive control over the creature. Falconry treatises disclose that a molting hawk is one that is highly rebellious and unreceptive to its master’s lure and call, making it a suitable figure of comparison for the adulterous Fenice, who has already exhibited her changeability by fleeing from her husband and taking up a new lover in Cligès. Fenice further assumes the traits of a molting hawk when she insists on emerging from the tower—an act of defiance that will lead to the couple’s discovery. Cligès cannot control her desire to enjoy fresh air, just as a falconer cannot curb the hawk’s desire to fly of its own accord rather than return to the lure of the falconer. The bird’s desire to do so is at its peak immediately post mewing because during their months of confinement, hawks have forgotten their training to the falconer’s lure. The romance thus depicts Fenice’s nature 7. This quotation from the Luttrell and Gregory edition of Cligès is cited by line number. My translation.

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as changeable in matters relating to the confinement of her body, whether imprisoned in an unhappy marriage or in a felicitous tryst. To sum up: the symbolic function of the two hawks in this romance establishes how a metaphor between bird and woman operates. The mewing hawk’s placement alongside Fenice enables the adulterous union; the bird’s changing feathers alert the reader to Fenice’s faithlessness as a wife, and to her rebelliousness as a cooped-up lover. Fenice’s desire to exit her enclosure follows treatises’ descriptions of a molted hawk’s desire to leave the mews upon molting. Once Fenice exits, a deserter sparrowhawk lands next to her, betraying her as a deserter wife. These back-to-back hawk references create their own formal enclosing structure around the female figure in this romance on a metanarrative level, making it impossible for her, and the women she represents, to escape the adulterous signification of the mews metaphor. Yet the romance might problematize from the beginning what it means for a woman to be compared to a mewing hawk—not a changeable woman, but a regenerative one, who regrows her feathers to assert control over her own body. Fenice’s namesake, the phoenix, is a bird who by dint of its nature is perpetually mewing—renewing its feathers and self.8 The mewing goshawk alongside Fenice points more to Fenice’s regeneration and reaction to being enclosed than to her adultery. And her emergence from the mews establishes her need to regain control over her body’s movements. These seedlings of doubt about the sturdiness of the metaphor, though only implied here, provide the parodic genre of fabliau material to rewrite as explicit resistance.

SHEDDING FEATHERS: FAUCON FROM FABLIAU TO ROMANCE Chrétien’s hawk metaphor enjoys a rich reworking in the thirteenth-century anonymous Guillaume au faucon. This fabliau uses a mewed falcon to describe its female protagonist and then concludes the tale with the lady’s cunning use of the pun “faucon” (falcon / false cunt), complicating and taking apart the mews metaphor tightly woven in Cligès. In the tale, a married lady resists a squire’s advances until he nearly dies of a hunger strike, at which point she requests that her lord grant the squire her lord’s “faucon,” the object he craves, to save his life. The lord acquiesces and believes he grants the squire his falcon only, but the squire interprets the “faucon” as his wife’s “faucon,” false cunt, 8. For a perspective on the torture Fenice endures and her subsequent revival as characteristic of a phoenix, see Gaunt, “Between Two (or More) Deaths,” 133; Farina, “Cligès the Anti-Tristan,” 45–46.

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apparently synecdochic for her adulterous body. If Cligès enclosed its female protagonist between two determinate hawk metaphors, this fabliau slips outside of that structure by using two figurative falcons to concede rather than withhold female agency. Such concessions are not surprising in a genre that celebrates women’s cunning more often than it condemns it.9 But this fabliau divines a female agency beyond its own text and manuscript. It reappropriates the language of a blazon and symbolism of a mewed falcon from two of Chrétien’s romances, prompting a reparative reading of female bodies and voices in adultery narratives beyond fabliaux. The fabliau’s rewriting of Chrétien’s romance models for readers how they might rewrite adulterous ladies in other texts that invoke the same mews metaphor. The deployment of the pun “faucon” at the fabliau’s conclusion suggests an alternative mode of reading romance. If the word “faucon” is meant to also represent two words, faux con, “false cunt,” the concept of female adultery seems inescapable when “faucon” is mentioned; however, the cross-generic literary history of the mews trope and the untranslatability of the pun leave interpretation open and ongoing in this tale and in intersecting adultery narratives. In drawing from romance, this fabliau prompts readers to approach gender relations in courtly literature with a subtle eye for revision. Guillaume au faucon is one of twenty-three fabliaux in the anthology MS BN fr 19152, which also contains fables;10 two long religious works; thirty-one short works besides the fabliaux, including lais, courtly conduct guides, moralistic and religious works; and three long romances. The abundant glossing in this manuscript demonstrates its wide circulation and popularity among courtly readers through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The anthology was possibly composed for a female audience, and by the mid-fifteenth century it bore the 11 marginalia of Lady Philippe Alamande of southeastern France. Carter Revard has already established that fabliaux “were actually in many cases parodic of courtly romances, implying an audience familiar with such romances.”12 To be sure, Guillaume au faucon is highly intertextual; it borrows formal and narrative elements from romance and lais, but perhaps because it ends with a genital pun and because of its codicological placement alongside other fabliaux, modern critics have discussed it only in the context of the fabliau tradition. Tracy Adams’s study of MS BN fr 19152 has begun to change the tides, dem 9. See Adams, “Cunningly Intelligent Characters”; Johnson, “Women on Top,” 299. 10. These are fables by a “Marie,” though perhaps not the same Marie de France of the Lais discussed in chapter 3. Wogan-Browne argues for a “possibility of multiple Maries” based on Ian Short’s philological research (Wogan-Browne, “Recovery and Loss,” 184). 11. Revard, “From French ‘Fabliau Manuscripts,’” 267. 12. Revard, “From French ‘Fabliau Manuscripts,’” 266.

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onstrating how fabliau anthologies “create conversations among the diverse works of their collections.”13 The conversation that guides the diverse contents of this manuscript, Adams argues, is the theme of “cunning intelligence,” which she poses was meant to instruct its readers to admire and emulate such ingenuity.14 But the fabliaux in this anthology can do more than thematize the disparate contents within their manuscript alone. They cast a wider net and encourage readerly engagement with the narratives and tales from which the fabliaux draw and which treat similar themes. The unresolved tensions that fabliaux open up in the narratives they parody were latent already in those romances, a fact especially evident when tropes overlap between genres. Guillaume au faucon reproduces fifty lines from Chrétien’s description of Blanchefleur in Perceval (c. 1190) but alters the blazon to include a direct rhetorical comparison between a lady and a hawk, and, specifically, a falcon “coming out of the mews.”15 This reworking engages the high style of romance to trouble essentializing claims such narratives make about adultery. Chrétien’s description of Blanchefleur compares her to a sparrowhawk or parrot: “Et la pucele vint plus cointe, / Et plus acesmee et plus jointe / Que espreviers ne papegaus” (2987–89; And the maiden was more cunning, / and more 16 elegant, and more attractive / than sparrowhawks or parrots). The fabliau’s blazon reproduces Chrétien’s description but adds two lines to compare the lady’s beauty to a falcon coming out of the mews: Que la dame estoit plus tres cointe, Plus tres acesmee et plus jointe, Quant el est paree et vestue, Que n’est faucons qui ist de mue, 17 Ne espervier, ne papegaut. (67–71)

13. Adams, “Cunningly Intelligent Characters,” 897. 14. Adams, “Cunningly Intelligent Characters,” 898. 15. This fabliau exhibits the earliest metaphor that refers directly to the bird’s emergence from the mews. There are earlier texts that compare the maturity of a woman’s beauty to its molting status. Since yearly molts are a way of marking age, it follows that the maturation of the bird is expressed through the number of molts it has undergone. Twelfth-century chanson de geste Aliscans mentions a “faucon mue” (2759) to compare a woman’s bright eyes to the eyes of a mewed falcon but does not refer to the plumage of the falcon or the changeability of the lady. The eyes of certain species of hawks change hue as they mature; for instance, a juvenile goshawk’s yellow eyes redden as it ages. 16. This quotation from the Roach edition of Perceval is cited by line number. My translation. 17. Quotations from the Eichmann edition of Guillaume au faucon are cited in text by line number. Translations and emphases are my own.

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[The lady was far more cunning, / far more elegant, and more attractive, / when she is adorned and dressed, / than is a falcon that comes out of the mews, / or a sparrowhawk, or a parrot.]

More than one hundred years ago, Shirley Gale Patterson pointed out that the fabliau borrows language from Chrétien in this description of the lady.18 On the surface, the mewed falcon addition seems purely contrastive: the “pucele” (maiden) Blanchefleur was an unmarried virgin bright and attractive (and impressionable) like an unmolted (i.e., juvenile) sparrowhawk or parrot; the “dame” (lady) of the fabliau has a matured and changeable body like an adult falcon that has molted at least one set of feathers. Her changing feathers appear to signal her change of heart when she succumbs to Guillaume’s pleas for sex. But the adverbial time clause qualifying the hawk metaphor reveals the comparison’s multilayered components: she is more cunning, et cetera, “quant el est paree et vestue / Que n’est faucons qui ist de mue” (when she is adorned and dressed / than is a falcon that comes out of the mews). The adornment of the metaphor itself is like a removable and superficial dressing atop the lady’s body. The clause qualifies the comparison: she is not an essentially changeable woman; her aspect when adorned is like a falcon of changing feathers. This qualification begins to dismantle the essentializing comparison between changeable birds and adulterous women, undermining what it means for a woman to be adulterous. The metaphor, like adornments and like feathers, is one that the lady can shed, and disassociate from her body. In coining this phrase for future adultery narratives, the fabliau sends a kind of Trojan horse into the apparently antifeminist texts that adopt the metaphor. It appears to usher in the antifeminist joke that women are by nature changeable, but its qualifier about the superficiality of molted feathers belies the joke’s apparent essentialism. Beneath the changing feathers, the work of the bird’s body is constant. The rest of the fabliau defines what that work is: using language to stay outside of misogynous structures of control. Speaking as a falcon is just how the lady of the fabliau negotiates between her husband’s control and her own control over how her body is represented. Rather than “metaphoriz[ing] women out of existence,” attending to the mews metaphor originating in this fabliau contributes to the efforts of feminist critics like Burns and Krueger to identify a resistant voice “speaking from the 18. In 1911 Patterson remarked in Modern Language Notes: “We know of no better illustration, in Old French chivalric literature, of the tendency to insist upon a conventional literary form to express the medieval ideal of female beauty, than appears from a borrowing of the portrait of Blanch-flour in Chrétien’s La Contes del Graal, by the author of the fabliau Guillaume au Faucon” (73).

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female body” from within a misogynous narrative framework.19 The invocation of a mewed “faucon” in the fabliau’s initial description of the lady sets the interpretive stage for the wordplay on “faucon” later in the fabliau when the lady must trick her husband into permitting her to grant sex to a lovesick and hunger-striking squire, Guillaume. Her manipulation of language gives credence to Adams’s observation that within the manuscript, “the cunningly intelligent being relies upon cleverness and the use of ruse, often in language, to bring about his or her ends.”20 The lady of the fabliau relies on the undecidability of language to negotiate from an “impossible position,” like so many of the female characters in MS BN fr 19152, a fact which, Adams argues, induces sympathy from readers.21 A sympathetic readerly response to the woman’s cunning provides an alternative to a misogynous interpretation of the lady, despite the adulterous outcome of the narrative. Forced to choose between starving Guillaume and cuckolding her husband, the lady sidesteps the moral dilemma through the homophonic pun faucon / faux con, “falcon” or “false cunt.” But more broadly, the blazon’s addition of the mews metaphor invites readers to reassess female characters likened to hawks with a similar sympathy for what work they can do to overcome antifeminist structures. The mews metaphor and the pun both engage the language of excess, allowing the lady’s voice to resist univocal interpretation of her body. The blazon describes the lady’s beauty as in excess of that of a falcon out of mews: her adorned body is far more cunning, elegant, and attractive than that of a mewed falcon. This language of excess makes that body even more uninterpretable than what the blazon proposes. And while she spends most of the fabliau attempting to persuade Guillaume to abandon his pursuit because she does not reciprocate his love, she nevertheless appears to welcome his sexual service once he is granted the “faucon.” This apparent change of heart is not a change at all; her voicing of the pun is consistent with her steadfast speech in maintaining control over her body—a control she demonstrates for the sake of the audience. Her own ability to create excess meaning with the word “faucon” signifies beyond the question of faithfulness to her husband and instead puts her in direct conversation with the reader. Her speech registers on a metanarrative level together with the fabliau’s intertextual conversation with Chrétien’s romances. This paronomastic feat extends to the audience, who is invited to admire, rather than chastise, her cunning. She uses the pun to escape a double bind in the narrative, but her pun also demonstrates for the reader an alternative to misogynistic interpretation: 19. Burns, Bodytalk, 18. 20. Adams, “Cunningly Intelligent Characters,” 904. 21. Adams, “Cunningly Intelligent Characters,” 914.

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Sire, Guillaumes que vez ci Si me requist vostre faucon, Et ge ne l’en voil faire don, Si voz dirai par quel maniere Qu’en voz oiseax n’ai ge que faire. (562–66) [Lord, Guillaume, whom you see there, / requested of me your falcon, / and I did not want to make him a gift of it, / and I will tell you why: / I have nothing to do with your birds.]

Rather than fulfilling an antifeminist prophecy, her voicing of this pun resists singular interpretation, absolving her of a totalizing blame. Those who interpret the pun turn her into an adulteress, but their interpretation does not erase the undecidability of the pun or of her self-representation. Criticism of this fabliau has focused so intently on the final “joke” of the pun that it has neglected to acknowledge how the initial comparison between the lady and the falcon complicates the last comparison. For Howard Bloch, “faucon” helps demonstrate how fabliaux, unlike “interminable” romances, “are short and dirty; but they clean up their own mess, and they never leave any loose ends.”22 That is, fabliaux use wordplay to foreclose univocal meaning, but their final joke doesn’t leave “any excess—any residue of energy or meaning” within the tale itself.23 What they do leave behind, he argues, is doubt about the existence of a relation between language and meaning.24 While the pun certainly disavows a univocal interpretation, Bloch’s final analysis overlooks the mewed hawk comparison entirely. Reading backwards from the pun, he is too quick to “read woman as a metaphor for male poetic invention,” a move that Burns believes “effects a surprising and subtle erasure of female 25 subjectivity.” Burns offers a reparative connection between the epistemological capacity of con (“cunt,” and through homophony, “knowledge,”), women’s bodies, and storytelling (cointe), though she does not bring it to bear on this particular fabliau. Her connection is apt in breathing new life into analyses of the lady of our fabliau, first described in the blazon as “plus tres cointe” (much more cunning) than a “faucon” (falcon or false cunt): that is, more cunning, but also with more of a story to tell than what the blazon conveys. The narrator’s very first description of the lady thus dodges “male poetic invention” 22. Bloch, Scandal of the Fabliaux, 127. 23. Bloch, Scandal of the Fabliaux, 127. 24. Bloch, Scandal of the Fabliaux, 127. 25. Burns, Bodytalk, 13.

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from her entrance as a mewed falcon in the blazon carrying through to her deployment of the pun “faucon.” With the intervention of the lady’s voice, the male narrator can’t keep a hold on what she is or how to characterize her, or how to tie up the “loose ends” first unraveled in her blazon. The tale ends with a summation of the events centering around Guillaume’s persistence in winning over his lady, eliding both his pitiably passive hunger-induced illness and the lady’s active and cunning role in reviving him and avoiding censure. Encroaching on this attempted encomium on male persistence, the lady uses her own metaphor to remind the audience of the distance between words and the objects for which they stand. She reminds them that “faucon” is both two words for one thing and one word for two things. The lady makes a comparison between her cunning use of “faucon” and a monetary system of value, effectively making a metaphor of a metaphor: Dist la dame: “Or avez faucon; .II. besanz valent un mangon.” Ce fu bien dit, .II. moz a’ un, Que il en auroit .II. por un. (607–10) [The lady said: “Now you have faucon. / Two besants are worth one mangon.” / It was well said, one thing has two words, / as he would have two of them for one.]

Her metaphor alludes to the problems of language and interpretation in terms of monetary exchange, which reopens the underlying uncertainty about changeability in the tale. Her own metaphor and pun capitalize on an excess of meaning to escape one-to-one signification, just as the mewed falcon metaphor does. Though the narrator follows up with his own interpretation of her final lines, the lady’s double metaphor seems to baffle the narrator into his own disarticulation—he equivocates because the lady’s proverb prevents him from interpreting her words in any exact manner. This is because the lady’s voice becomes self-referential and speaks once again above the narrator and to the audience directly. She equates the system of sexual signification with the system of economic exchange and locates their intersection in the realm of linguistic interpretation. The lady’s metaphor of a metaphor creates surplus value that effaces meaning even as it produces excess. This complex poetic move is aptly explained by Jacques Derrida: when a coin is used in metaphor as “the point of crossover,” it enables “the scene of interchange between linguistics and economics [. . .] the

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reference here seems to be economic and the metaphor linguistic.”26 Turning to Saussure, he continues, “the question of metaphor belongs here to a theory of value, and not merely to a theory of meaning.”27 A coin is, after all, a material paradox in a system of value composed “of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which value is to be determined” (using a mangon to purchase a falcon, for example) and, paradoxically, “of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined” 28 (measuring besants against a mangon). The ambiguous pronoun “un” in the fabliau narrator’s interpretation of the lady’s last words proves how impossible it is to translate or decide to what objects the “faucon” pun grants access: “Ce fu bien dit, .II. moz a’ un, / Que il en auroit .II. por un” (609–10; It was well said, one thing has two words, / as he would have two of them for one). It is unclear whether Guillaume will have two words and two things or two words only: Guillaume’s possession of the signified is complicated by the ambiguity of the signifiers. Ultimately, the lady conceals her meaning behind the undecidable and excessive force of the pun. Her speech contains one nearly untranslatable, “faucon,” but she also equates “faucon” to the name for a coin: mangon. Her metaphor does not clarify; instead, it obfuscates readers’ interpretation of “faucon.” But using her own metaphor also grants her the power of poetic invention, reissuing control over how her body is metaphorized and interpreted. If the narrator used a mews metaphor to describe her initially, she has used her own metaphor here to show how slippery and indeterminate such comparisons are. The fabliau’s borrowings and reworkings of the symbolic hawk from Chrétien’s works urge an alternative mode of reading romance that follows the lady’s evasion of interpretation. By engaging Chrétien’s language from Perceval to describe an adulterous lady’s beauty but adding to the blazon the symbolic function of the mewing hawk from Cligès, Guillaume au faucon makes a slyly feminist move for its readers. In Cligès, the eponymous lover was in control of the mews metaphor—he had placed the goshawk alongside Fenice so that he could use the molting bird as an excuse to visit the secluded tower. In the fabliau, however, it is the lady who is in control of the pun “faucon” and thus, retroactively, the mewing “faucon” comparison in the blazon. While, on the one hand, the fabliau’s narrative does not completely liberate the lady’s body— she remains an object of exchange lusted after by two men who lay claim to her—on the other hand, her voicing of the pun does grant the lady control 26. Derrida, “White Mythology,” 15. 27. Derrida, “White Mythology,” 16. 28. Saussure quoted in Derrida, “White Mythology,” 16.

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over how her body is represented in speech and metaphor, therefore creating a multiplicity of potential interpretations. My turn to the fabliau genre joins a critical discourse begun by Lesley Johnson in the 1980s: far from simply “condemn[ing]” female characters’ “performance,” fabliaux position women to “come out on top” precisely because of their ingenuity in navigating adultery narratives.29 Holly Crocker builds on Johnson’s work to observe that “fabliaux acknowledge the necessity for women to maintain agency in order [for men] to direct their desires.”30 While these scholars and others have recognized fabliau’s parodic relationship to romance, specific shared tropes between the genres remain relatively unexplored. The text-hopping trope of the mewed falcon allows us to follow what Roberta Krueger names the “trace of women’s resistance to their cultural appropriation.”31 By positioning the female voice from the fabliau across texts and centuries, the mewed falcon trope enables the “resistant doubled discourse” that E. Jane Burns terms “bodytalk.”32 Burns uses this term to explain “how female voices, fashioned by a male author to represent misogynous fantasies of female corporeality, can also be heard to rewrite the tales in which 33 they appear.” As Krueger (invoking Burns) argues, listening to these “women who ‘talked back’” would have allowed female readers to “reject and undermine [the] misogynistic strategies” of the adultery narrative, allowing for a reparative reading of seemingly appropriated female bodies.34 Likewise, in her examination of the obscene’s connection to “embodied subjectivities” in medieval texts, Carissa Harris notes that Burns’s “bodytalk” is audible precisely when “women’s literary voices articulate protest against social stigma and vociferously challenge men who assault, mistreat, betray, or harass them.”35 Rather than cleaning up its own mess, I suggest that “faucon” actually generates new messes within the fabliau and across intersecting literature. Anne Elizabeth Cobby turns to the Guillaume au faucon in her study of parody and formula to argue that from its beginning, this was a tale that took up both courtly and parodic strands: “The tale is courtly in background, actions and expression; but at its heart is lust, which has the last word.”36 While this fabliau appears to contain its “lust” at a safe generic distance from romance, I 29. Johnson, “Women on Top,” 299. 30. Crocker, “Disfiguring Gender,” 349. 31. Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender, 13. 32. Burns, Bodytalk, 7. 33. Burns, Bodytalk, 7. 34. Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender, 13. 35. Harris, Obscene Pedagogies, 11. 36. Cobby, Ambivalent Conventions, 49.

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am suggesting that the intertextuality and indeterminacy of the mews metaphor closes that distance. The fabliau revises a courtly romance metaphor and cloaks it in an indeterminate and subversive body pun, importantly voiced by the female protagonist. The mewed hawk acts as a signifier that guides interpretation of the female body in romance, yet it slips easily into a space of fluctuating control, a fluctuation celebrated in fabliaux. Finally, the pun’s excess of meaning not only permeates the description of the lady’s body as a “faucons qui ist de mue,” it also prompts a rereading of narratives that appear to use the trope of the mewed hawk to designate and derogate adulterous women as changeable.

MEWING IN ALLEGORY: MACHAUT’S LE DIT DE L’ALERION Guillaume de Machaut’s mid-fourteenth-century allegory Le dit de l’alerion is just such a narrative: its 4,814 lines of allegorical verse use falconry conventions to instruct lovers on the pitfalls and successes of training women in love like falcons in flight. I turn to Machaut’s poem at this point in the literary history because of its extended engagement with the mews metaphor: the allegory theorizes what it means for a hawk to shed its feathers in a section spanning eighty lines. Machaut’s influence on Chaucer is indisputable, and this allegory is chronologically situated between the fabliau and the Troilus.37 The poem, possibly produced at Bonne of Luxembourg’s court between 1342 and 1357,38 is extant in nine manuscripts, six of which were illuminated, and of these, three witnesses of the text contain between five and eighteen illumina39 tions. Most of these illustrations resemble those in falconry treatises, featuring birds associating with humans, and falconry accouterments such as the glove or perch (see fig. 5.1). Besides the allegorical content creating a parallel between courtship and falconry, however, nine illustrations depict the figures Love, Courtesy, and Reason in human female form (see fig. 5.2). In figure 5.1, a sparrowhawk clutches its prey atop a perch, and although no human figures are present, the falconer’s glove is metonymic for the human narrator’s presence and control. This illustration bears resemblance to those in falconry treatises such as Frederick II’s. However, figure 5.2 aptly illustrates the allegorical 37. For Wimsatt, Machaut isn’t just influential; he argues that Chaucer’s artistry “stands in important ways closer to Machaut than it does to any writer of whatever century or country” in Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, 77. 38. Hoepffner, introduction to La dit de l’alerion, 5. 39. Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 217.

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FIGURE 5. 1. Detail of folio 68r of Guillaume de Machaut, Poésies, BnF MS Fr 1586. Used with permission from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

purpose of the treatise: the personification of Love bestows upon the narrator the love match represented by the hawk on her glove. She is accompanied by other allegorical feminine figures in such a way as to visually subvert gendered control over the kneeling lover, who is positioned subordinate to both Love and the female hawk. The poem’s allegorical presentation of a mewed hawk as a changeable lover appears to create a more conservative parallel between bird and woman, but what we saw in the fabliau’s complication of this metaphor allows us to read the allegory differently. The fabliau began to take apart the comparison between women and birds by separating feathers’ superficial quality from the body beneath adornments. Le dit de l’alerion further disaggregates the mewed hawk metaphor by comparing a bird’s molting feathers to a woman’s molting heart, an external/internal dichotomy elaborated on by other falconry treatises. Read on one level, Le dit de l’alerion is itself a falconry treatise: it

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FIGURE 5. 2. Detail of folio 76r of Guillaume de Machaut, Poésies, BnF MS Fr 1586. Used with permission from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

describes the phases of training birds of prey to hunt and return to humans. It shares terminology and observations with such treatises and relies on a readership familiar with the intricacies of falconry as a practice. But beneath the falconry treatise is a commentary on women’s nature that, despite initial appearances, produces more and not less opportunity for female agency and interpretive choice. The poem’s use of falconry comparisons supports evasion of control rather than subjugation to a faithful training of female obedience. The untidy loose ends we saw in the fabliau and shall see here help shape the reading practice I’ve been describing throughout this book: hawk comparisons incite cross-generic unravelings and rereadings because of the network of relationships that falconry evokes.

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Le dit de l’alerion is a narrative about training birds and training women, about testing methods of control until one proves successful; at the same time, it uses the mewing concept of “adornment” to comment on the unreliability of comparison as a form of representation. The dual-layered problem of mewing helps reveal problems in the dual-layered form of allegory. Because Machaut’s poem is simultaneously a falconry treatise and a guide to courtly love, it draws from and contributes to representations of control in both genres. Thus, the narrative of training and losing hawks speaks to the narrator’s message about testing and rejecting types of behavior in women. In the course of the poem, the narrator-falconer trains and loses four birds: a sparrowhawk, which he loses after it emerges from the mews; an alerion, which he loses while flying it too high but will eventually regain in the conclusion; an eagle, which he also loses while flying; and a gyrfalcon, which he abandons because it shamefully sets upon a loathsome owl and refuses to relinquish the unacceptable prey. The very fact of the narrator’s changeability (he moves quickly from one bird to another) seems slyly unquestioned, even as he expresses fear about his molting sparrowhawk’s change of heart. He explicitly addresses the duallayered nature of his poem and uses the adjective “paré” (adorned) to describe the mewed hawk trope’s relationship to the entire allegory: “Or ay je bien ce fait paré, / Quant j’ay a dame compare / L’esprivier” (1197–99 emphasis added; “Now I have adorned this [the poem] well when to the lady I’ve compared the sparrowhawk” 75).40 He speaks of the comparison itself as an adornment, in the same terms that our fabliau described the lady’s likeness to a “faucon” “quant el est paree” (69; when she is adorned). But in the next few lines, he elaborates on the bird’s need to shed its feathers, its adornment, causing readers to reassess the allegorical reach of a comparison that is merely an “adornment” on the poem. The poem depicts the mewing phase of falconry as a weak point in the falconer’s ability to predict or control the bird’s body, potentiating agency for the women represented under the allegorical surface layer. The mews metaphor oddly uses an external change in the hawk to describe an internal change in the lady’s heart, and this structural misalignment helps redefine female changeability. The narrator notices “son plumage” (1215; “its plumage” 75) and must reluctantly “ce gent espriveir mettre en mue” (1217; “put [the] sparrowhawk, that noble creature, in the mew” 75). His reluctance derives from fear of what might result internally from the bird’s external change: 40. Quotations from Le dit de l’alerion cited by line number in the Hoepffner edition. Translations are cited by page number in Grunmann-Gaudet and Hieatt’s edition. At times I have deviated from their translation and have noted where I have done so.

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Je pensay en secret recoy, Selonc contrainte oubeïssance, Entremeslee de doubtance, Que s’il muoit de son plumage, Qu’il ne muast de son corage Et qu’il ne fust plus dongereus Que devant, et meins amoureus. (1238–44) [I quietly thought about this secret, / according to constrained obedience / itself mixed with doubt: / that if she would molt her feathers, / she might molt her heart, / and that she would be more resistant / than before, and 41 less loving.]

Just as in chapter 2’s discussion of La Nina Siciliana’s sonnet, the masculine pronouns referring to the female bird/lover might give pause and require a bit of ornithological context: “l’esprivier,” the sparrowhawk, always referred to a female bird, though the noun itself is masculine. In medieval bird nomenclature, “specific, different names were reserved for the male of each species,” so a male sparrowhawk was always referred to by a specific name, “mouschet” (musket).42 This gendered naming paradox nevertheless points to the unreliability between the allegorical shroud and the supposed “truth” of women’s nature. And when read alongside the narrator’s description of his own “contrainte oubeïssance” (constrained obedience)—a description we would expect to see applied to the bird/lady—it makes it difficult to distinguish who is controlling whom in the relationship between bird and human, woman and man. The motive for the narrator’s “doubtance,” the description of what happens when a bird mews, further expands this structural misalignment. Lines 1241– 42 set up a causal relationship between molting feathers and molting heart, which the two lines’ parallel syntax and end-rhyme of “plumage” and “corage” reinforces: “Que s’il muoit de son plumage, / Qu’il ne muast de son corage” (1241–42; that if she would molt her feathers, she might molt her heart). The expression “molting the heart” uses the external, literal action of molting 41. I have elected to offer my own translation of this passage to highlight its unusual and difficult grammatical features. 42. Grunmann-Gaudet and Hieatt, “Introduction,” 25. The translators of the edition to which I refer make explicit note of their election to always refer to the birds as female, despite the male pronoun, because of the consistent medieval usage of different names for male and female species of birds of prey. They note the difficulty for those writing in languages that must “take grammatical gender into consideration” (25): “while [Machaut] must have known that the birds preferred in falconry were female, his language required that the appropriate pronoun describe the gender of the noun, not that of the bird, so he did not have to choose between dramatic and grammatical correctness, as we did” (26).

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feathers to describe an internal, behavioral effect. Yet the figurative expression of internal change nevertheless retains the physical connotations of “molting,” which are not equivalent to the more abstract “changing,” a paronomastic subtlety not apparent in translation. While “muer” can mean “change” in Old French, it coincides more with the ornithological “molt” than with the alternative verb for change, “changer.” Machaut here has chosen to keep the verb “muer” consistent across his description of what a bird’s feathers do and what its heart does, and this consistency is significant. Different from “changing” the heart, “molting” evokes shedding weathered adornments for the purpose of renewal, less exchanging for something different than regenerating what was there before. New feathers grow back stronger, so a heart renewed of its prior strength and quality might reveal that it was from the outset not under the falconer’s or lover’s control. This schema recasts changeability as renewal: the mewed hawk’s molted heart depicts fidelity to the work of its own body rather than fidelity to a falconer’s control. This section of the poem separates what the hawk has been trained to desire (to fly within its master’s control) from what its body needs (to molt its feathers), introducing the question of the bird’s agency in the poem. Other falconry treatises reveal that the bird’s adherence to its own bodily needs might overcome and even be more prized than fidelity to the falconer. In order to predict potential disobedience, Frederick II’s falconry treatise De arte venandi cum avibus turns to the plumage of birds as a heuristic device for interpreting the trainability of their nature and the success of their flight, which are not always compatible categories. The treatise draws a distinction between the hawk’s form and its plumage, and it indicates that more beautiful plumage, though signifying loyalty, is not preferable to fine form of limbs beneath the plumage: De illis qui sunt bone forme et turpis plumagii et male forme et pulcri plumagii, preeligendi sunt illi qui sunt bone forme. Ex bona namque forma velociores sunt et plus possunt operari, quamvis non sint constantes ut illi qui sunt pulcri plumagii. Ex pulcro autem plumagio, quamvis sint constantes ad quod docentur, deberent esse meliores propter pulcritudinem plumagii, set propter non bonam formam non poterunt operari quod deberent. (Emphasis added, 962.23–29) [Regarding those that are of a good form and ugly plumage, or bad form and beautiful plumage, those that are of good form are to be preferred. For, because of their good form, they are faster and can do more work, although they may not be as faithful as those that are of beautiful plumage. On the other hand, although due to their beautiful plumage [the others] may be

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faithful to what they are taught, they should be [as in, one might expect them to be] better because of their beautiful plumage, yet because they are not of good form, they will not be able to do the work that they should.]

Here the treatise reveals a subtle duality in the exterior appearance of hawks: there are those who appear ugly because of their plumage but are actually beautifully formed beneath their feathers, and those who appear beautiful because of their plumage but are ill-formed beneath. The treatise does not dichotomize between inner and outer beauty here—both form and plumage are external features. Beautiful plumage signifies faithfulness to the falconer, but beautiful form signifies faithfulness to the work of the hawk’s body—flight. So, while those of beautiful feathers are more likely to remain faithful to the falconer, they are less likely to perform their task of flying and stooping at prey, and therefore less preferable for the falconer to possess. The relationship between beauty and constancy is therefore complicated by a third element: competency. The above confession constructs an alternative kind of constancy that does not necessarily rest on a relationship between hawk and falconer, but rather between the form of the hawk and the work of the hawk’s body. A bird with a fine form, or finely formed limbs, occurs more by chance than by design. As much as falconers can influence through diet and enclosure the growth of flight and down feathers, they cannot lend good form to a malformed bird. The beautifully plumed ought to be better because they are more faithful, but they are not better, because they cannot do the work that they ought to do. In other words, falconers’ preference for good form over beautiful plumage creates the possibility of a kind of fidelity that frightens even as it dazzles the falconer: the faithfulness between the form of the bird and the execution of its craft, which is to fly high and dive forcefully at its prey, and not necessarily to return to the arm of the falconer. And indeed, this post-mewing fate is sealed when Le dit de l’alerion’s sparrowhawk emerges from the mews and refuses the falconer’s control; however, the description of the falconer’s loss displaces blame from the bird to its position relative to him. The poem reveals the bird’s captivity as the structure against which its fidelity is conventionally measured. The poem’s mewing allegory, then, does not depict women as inconstant. It shifts the blame from the hawk itself to the circumstances of molting in captivity, suggesting not that women are of a mutable nature but that they are subject to a structural double bind: Dont moult bien et moult bel mua, Et la mue continua

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Jusqu’a tant qu’il fu tous muëz, De sa vieil plume desmuëz Et de nouvelle revistis. Mais il en fu si parvertis Qu’arrier de moy fu transportez S’en fu forment desconfortez, Quant par la mue le perdi. (1253–61) [Therefore, she molted very well and very properly, / and the molting continued / until she was completely molted, / with her old plumage molted off / and with new [plumage] redressed. / But she was so corrupted by this / that afterwards she was carried off from me; / I was so very disconsolate by this, 43 / since I lost her through the molt.]

This passage’s obsessive repetition of various forms of “muer” in four consecutive lines (1253–56) suggests that the narrator blames the hawk’s need to molt rather than the hawk itself. “Et la mue continua,” and the mewing continued, he says, apparently blaming the course of time required for the feathers to replenish. But the personal pronouns in the second half of this lament betray the real problem behind the hawk’s abandonment: the narrator’s attempt to control another creature’s body. The hawk was carried away “from me” (de moy), the narrator admits, “I lost her” (perdi), he confesses. The bird was not lost to itself; it was changed or “parvertis” (corrupted) not in relation to its own nature but only in relation to the falconer attempting to control and retain it. As with the lady in the fabliau, those who interpret the hawk’s molt turn it into a traitor; it is only lost in relation to those who would try to possess it. On the allegorical level, which casts this hawk as a lady who turns away from her lover, what we are left with at the end of this mewing section is not 44 a window into women’s “essential and mutable nature” but rather a failed attempt to adorn women with a metaphor when the metaphor’s loose ends and composite structure come unraveled so easily.

CRISEYDE IN AND OUT OF MEW The repetition of the mewed hawk trope from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries exposes this unraveling to allow for a new understanding of female agency that comes to the fore in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. 43. My translation. 44. Newlin, “Moult and Mastery,” 40–41.

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In Book III, at the pinnacle of the lovers’ bliss, the narrator describes Criseyde “as fressh as faukoun comen out of muwe” (III.1783).45 The term “muwe” occurs again when things begin to fall apart for the lovers at their imminent separation: Criseyde insists she will “not so ben hid in muwe” in the Greek camp (IV.1310). Book III’s mews metaphor casts Criseyde as an adulterous woman two books too soon, prompting a premature judgment of her a priori. At the same time, the Troilus narrator often equivocates on condemning Criseyde, despite delivering a narrative that nevertheless results in her unequivocal adultery.46 The trope of the mewed hawk as adulterous woman, then, is not so straightforwardly condemnatory when Chaucer uses it in Troilus and Criseyde, and the falconry image helps readers parse the difference between condemnatory “change” and ambivalent “renewal.” This ambivalence, as we have seen, is not unique to the Troilus, though Chaucer does use the mewing trope in a distinctively unsuspicious way. Critics have interpreted this metaphor as contributing to the text’s subtle if conflicted condemnation of Criseyde. For Robert Newlin, the comparison between Criseyde and a mewing falcon depicts her as “(dangerously) changeable” and serves to undercut Troilus’s moment atop Fortune’s wheel by alluding to the “essential and mutable nature” of women.47 R. A. Shoaf tracks each instantiation of the word “muwe” and its cognates in Chaucer’s poem; in grouping all of the meanings of “muwe,” he comes to understand the term as more capacious—as referring to “the mewe of love” and applicable to both Troilus and Criseyde.48 While gathering all occurrences of the word helps give an overall picture of its significance, such a method risks overlooking the connections to the history of the trope in the very specific application to Criseyde. When applied to Criseyde, Shoaf finds the comparison suggestive of her “changing her widow’s weeds, at least for Troilus’s benefit, for more attrac49 tive apparel” as part of her desire to “satisfy [Troilus’s] hunger,” or he locates a “darker motive” substantiating “doubts about Criseyde” as a double-dealing woman. For Shoaf, Criseyde’s “mewing” represents her changing identity as “Troilus’s love one moment and Diomedes’s love the next.”50 Such readings 45. Citations to the Riverside edition of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde occur parenthetically in text by book and line number. 46. On the topic of the narrator’s ambivalence in condemning Criseyde, see Elaine Tuttle Hansen’s Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender and Catherine Cox’s Gender and Language in Chaucer. On the critical history of Criseyde’s ambiguity, see Patrick J. Horner, “To ‘speken in amphibologies,’” pp. 84–86. 47. Newlin, “Moult and Mastery,” 40–41. 48. Shoaf, “Troilus and Criseyde,” 156. 49. Shoaf, “Troilus and Criseyde,” 157. 50. Shoaf, “Troilus and Criseyde,” 158.

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helpfully demonstrate the availability of falconry terms to gloss romance narratives. But, as I have been arguing throughout this book, medieval readers versed in the nuances of falconry training bring nuanced understanding of the hawk/human comparisons. This nuance produces another reading of Criseyde as a mewing falcon, and this reading alters the entire poem’s attitude toward Criseyde. In this last section, we shall see the culmination of the tension in the narrator’s metaphor comparing Criseyde to a mewed “faukoun” in Book III, and, in a cunning invocation of the fabliau female voice, in Criseyde’s invocation of the metaphor in Book IV, a last attempt to reclaim control over how her body will be interpreted, if not by Troilus, then at least by the reader. Elizabeth Allen argues that Criseyde’s speech participates in Chaucer’s resistance to the poem’s ending, a process that discourages readers from interpreting Criseyde backwards from her betrayal at the end of the poem.51 If Criseyde’s promises employ a resistance to linear narrative, the mewed hawk trope offers an alternative mode of interpreting both her resistance and her figurative flight from Troilus. In fact, as we shall see, Chaucer’s choice to change his source material to include the mewed hawk metaphor refocuses Troilus’s tragedy on his own misreading of Criseyde and suggests an alternative way for an audience to reread her. The Troilus’s mewed hawk stanza makes an important change to the corresponding language from Boccaccio’s Filostrato; just as Guillaume au faucon amended Chrétien’s blazon, Chaucer adds to his description of the female beloved a mewed hawk comparison, and with it a set of interpretive possibilities not present in the source text. In the Filostrato, Boccaccio uses a hawk comparison to describe Troiolo as being as beautiful as an unhooded falcon— that is, a falcon that has its sight restored and flies inspired by what it sees, in this case Criseida: Ne’ tempi delle triegue egli uccellava, Falcon, gerfalchi ed aquile tenendo, E tal fiata con li can cacciava, Orsi, cinghiali e gran lion seguendo, Li piccoli animal tutti spregiava; Ed a’ suoi tempi Criseida vedendo, Si rifaceva grazioso e bello, 52 Come falcon ch’uscisse di cappello. (III.91) 51. Allen, “Flowing Backward to the Source,” 683–85. 52. This quotation from the Surdich edition of Il Filostrato is cited by book and stanza number. My translation.

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[During times of truce he went hawking, / keeping falcons, gyrfalcons, and eagles. / And at certain times he went hunting with dogs, / chasing bears, boards, and big lions. / He despised all the little animals. / And at opportune moments, seeing Criseida, / he made himself charming and beautiful, / like a falcon that has come out from its hood.]

The falconry allusion’s singular focus—Troiolo—depicts the soldier-lover’s eagerness to shed his wartime brutishness and “remake” himself as a beautiful lover in times of truce. Like an unhooded falcon, he is at liberty to see his surroundings, choose his path, and he has chosen Criseida, displaying his beauty to entice her to choose him as well. Foregrounding the lust with which Troiolo pursues his prey, this comparison is without the subtle questions of fidelity and interpretation that Chaucer’s alignment between the mewing falcon and his Criseyde will introduce. Changing the referent of the falconry comparison from Troilus to Criseyde places her in the company of Fenice, the fabliau’s lady, and Machaut’s sparrowhawk, but first it must be established that she is indeed the object of comparison. While the ambiguous syntax and gender-neutral adjective “fressh” make the referent of this metaphor indeterminate compared with the unambiguous syntax and masculine adjectives “grazioso e bello” in the Filostrato, the Chaucerian tradition of gendering avian subjects presents a strong case that this simile is meant for Criseyde. Chaucer consistently uses technical ornithological terminology when he names raptorial birds: “tercelet” in 53 reference to a male falcon and “faucon” in reference to a female falcon. Here, he uses “faucon” and not “tercelet,” suggesting that the comparison applies to Criseyde: “Ful ofte his lady from hire wyndow down, / As fressh as faukoun comen out of muwe, / Ful redy was hym goodly to saluwe” (III.1779–85; very often his lady, down from her window, / as fresh as a falcon coming out of the mews, / was quite ready to greet him well). These lines give Criseyde a place: her “wyndow”; a movement: “down”; and an action: “saluwe.” While Criseyde’s placement, movement, and action are absent from Boccaccio’s stanza, Chaucer switches to describing only Criseyde by the fifth line, one line prior to the falcon comparison. The position of the line comparing a character to a mewed falcon also suggests that it is meant for Criseyde: the simile is contained within a description of Criseyde’s placement inside a mewslike structure and her 53. See, for example, the Squire’s Tale (explored in the next chapter) and Parliament of Fowls, where these terms clarify the gender of the bird characters. Grunmann-Gaudet and Hieatt concur, noting that “Chaucer, among others, could simply assume ‘falcon’ meant a female bird. If he wanted to talk about a male falcon, he used the term tercel (proper for any male hawk, but especially the peregrine falcon)” (25).

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action emerging from such a structure. The comparison no longer resembles Boccaccio’s at all: she is not an unhooded falcon accustomed to the fist and ready for the hunt; she is a reinvigorated and molted falcon, emerging from her months of solitude, uninhibited by male control. Finally, then, the stanza’s description of Troilus as falconer in the first line and the parallelism between Criseyde’s movement down from a window and the falcon’s movement out of a mews all suggest that this line was meant for Criseyde, a pointed alteration of the Filostrato’s corresponding stanza. Newlin also believes that Chaucer has changed Boccaccio’s description to apply to Criseyde instead of Troilus, but his discussion of the purpose of this change, an invocation of “mew-anxiety,” explicates the metaphor in conventional terms of changeability and gender essentialism.54 Reading this moment as “mew-anxiety” unveils only half the picture; such an interpretation overlooks the subtleties of falconry metaphors at their peak by the fourteenth century. The shift from Troiolo as an unhooded falcon to Criseyde as a mewed falcon engages “faucon”’s history of female figures resisting control over their representation. A fourteenth-century French ivory mirror valve (fig. 5.3) helps demonstrate the interpretive possibilities that arise when ars venandi are used to represent ars amatoria. Mirror cases “depict scenes [. . .] drawn from the realm of romance, broadly defined as the narrative, often heavily allegorized, literature [. . .] of courtship and courtliness.”55 These mirror cases traditionally held symbolic value for their owners, who used the reflective surface for personal grooming and the ivory carvings as a marker of social status. Alexa Sand asserts that “both literature and the pictorial arts often represented mirrors as indices of iniquity [. . .] the deceptive qualities of reflection [. . .] pointed towards moral falsity,” and at the very least their romance scenes depicted “a code of morality somewhat at odds in its emphasis on worldly honor and 56 physical love with such core Christian values as humility and chastity.” That many of these cases depicted hunting scenes, and specifically hunting with hawks, points to the facility with which the activity of falconry signified “sexual and amatory relations” “at the very heart” of mirror valve engravings.57 This particular mirror case depicts two lovers, each wearing a falconer’s gauntlet. The man directs his gaze toward the woman’s face and points one finger at her genitals, while her gaze points to his hand and crossed legs. Referring to the culturally diffused “faucon” pun from our fabliau, S. L. Smith argues that 54. Newlin, “Moult and Mastery,” 39. 55. Sand, “Fairest of Them All,” 533. 56. Sand, “Fairest of Them All,” 535. 57. Sand, “Fairest of Them All,” 533.

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FIGURE 5. 3. French ivory mirror case. © Trustees of the British Museum.

in this scene the “falcon becomes the metaphorical substitute for the true con to which the young man points.”58 But this mirror valve does not stop at depicting the female body as an object of male lust. It lends a visual to the double bind of the mewed hawk metaphor. The male falconer’s pointing finger signifies a desired interchangeability between “faucon” and the lady’s “false cunt,” yet this equivalence holds only because the bird is in his possession. The female figure in this mirror case portrays the woman’s predicament: she too wears a falconer’s gauntlet, and though it is momentarily uninhabited by the bird, its position is higher than the glove of the man, making it the highest perch available and thus the next stop on the hawk’s flight. This imminent landing suggests that the 58. Smith, “Gothic Mirror and the Female Gaze,” 81.

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hawk as object and as metaphor is also under her own control. The hawk’s outstretched wings and orientation toward the woman’s glove suggest that the bird is poised to fly to her extended left arm. And in her right hand a hood, a primary mechanism of control in falconry, also seems to suggest that the lady is the bird’s true owner. The scene depicted on this mirror valve is finally relevant to our interest in Criseyde because it shows us the complex relationships between interpretation, sexuality, falconry, and control: if the male figure does not have complete control over the hawk or “faucon,” a metaphor for the sexual liberty of his lady, he can only ever interpret her through his fear of losing that control. When seen from the female falconer’s perspective, the metaphor is within reach of the lady’s own control and her own interpretation. A structural examination of the stanza framing the “faucon” comparis on in the Troilus reveals a dynamic similar to that of the ivory mirror valve. The male figure appears to have possession of the falcon but finally misund erstands his role in relation to the bird: a spectator watching a self-possessed creature. Though Troilus is unable to recognize Criseyde’s attempts at fidelity, the history of the trope that I’ve been tracing provides the reader interpretive tools to discern her through the mews metaphor. The second half of the stanza describes Criseyde’s movement in terms of agency: she is not a hawk under Troilus’s control but a mewed falcon that chooses to greet him rather than flee. The pivotal fourth line of the stanza, however, shows us how Troilus misunderstands his role in relation to Criseyde’s agency: In tyme of trewe, on haukyng wolde he ride, Or elles honte boor, beer, or lyoun; The smale bestes leet he gone biside. And whan that he com ridyng into town, Ful ofte his lady from hire wyndow down, As fressh as faukoun comen out of muwe, Ful redy was hym goodly to saluwe. (III.1779–85)

In the first line of the rhyme royal stanza, Troilus would “ride” “on haukyng,” and in line 4 he comes “rydinge into toun”: the repetition at the turning point of the stanza of a word associated in the first line with hawking reiterates Troilus’s status as a falconer when he comes “into toun.” And the last three lines cast Criseyde as a falcon, but importantly, not one under his control. By setting up the final couplet’s first line with the end-rhyme of “muwe,” the stanza prepares the reader for the final rhyme of “true.” Chaucer takes advantage here of the reader’s expectation of a facile predictable rhyme to convey Troilus’s assumption that Criseyde’s fidelity will be completely legible and predictable.

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The unexpected “muwe”/“saluwe” couplet deployed instead points to the complexity of Criseyde’s agency and self-control. The verb “saluwe”59 allows her to demonstrate dynamic action instead of resting on a static description of the cliched adjective “true.” Criseyde’s movement in this passage, downwards from her literal window, or figurative mews, to greet Troilus suggests that she returns to him of her own volition, and not because she has been trained to do so. That she does so during a time when, according to the prescripts of falconry, she should be most independent and rebellious demonstrates her freedom to choose faithfulness. Crocker points out that “chastity and fidelity” are not “necessarily repressive” virtues per se, but they become so when they “are treated as cultural forces beyond women’s control.”60 In this moment of the poem, readers can choose how to read the mewed hawk metaphor. In terms of “mew-anxiety,” they might interpret the absence of the expected “true” rhyme as a foreboding premonition of Criseyde’s adultery beyond her control. Or they might interpret the falconry reference as a representation of Criseyde’s predicament: despite the possible negative implications of metaphor and pun adorning her, she uses her freedom to assert her sovereignty and fidelity simultaneously. Machaut’s allegory helps gloss what it means here for Criseyde to “comen out of muwe,” but it is also easily misinterpreted as reinforcing anxiety about her freedom and her eventual betrayal rather than attention to what she does in the lines following her emergence from the mews. Her readiness to greet Troilus suggests the alternative meaning we saw in Machaut’s comparison of molting plumage and a molting heart: a renewal of vigor and regrowth of what was there before. Criseyde comes down from her window “as fressh as faukon comen out of muwe.” The focus in this comparison has less to do with the falcon’s inner change and desire to flee than with its physical need to regrow feathers and renew strength. “Fressh” evokes the immediate present and not the predicted future, confounding interpretations of foreboding nature. Criseyde here “saluwes,” or greets and pays obeisance to Troilus, and she does so often and “goodly,” when by all falconry accounts, she should be eager to bypass greeting him at all. In her study on the embodiment of ethics, Crocker argues that Criseyde “tak[es] up feminine virtue as an external posture, avow[ing] her fidelity as an abstract absolute detached from the particularities of circumstance,” which becomes evident when we see Criseyde ultimately adhere to a system of “social conduct” and “decorum” rather than 59. According to the Middle English Dictionary Online, this word can also be applied to “a bird: to sing greetings to,” s.v. “Saluen” (v.1.c). Chaucer has used this word in avian context: “The bisy larke, messager of day, / Salueth in hir song the morwe gray” (Knight’s Tale 1492). 60. Crocker, “‘As false as Cressid,’” 305.

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“a system of ethical values” and “virtue.”61 But the particular circumstance of her emergence from the tower suggests not just human ethics but falconry prescriptives, and Criseyde’s choice to act out fidelity is a redemptive moment, despite the final outcome of the romance. The falconry treatise’s surprising preference for the well-formed bird over the faithful, beautiful bird allows us to redefine the concept of fidelity overall in the Troilus. Criseyde overcomes the inauspicious cast of the mewed hawk metaphor at this moment to demonstrate that her actions are not manipulable by others; her movements are tactically based on fidelity, and it is in this way that we should regard them when she is forced to part from Troilus. It is her “individual persistence” in virtue that the temporal diction finally emphasizes62 (she greets him “ful ofte”), and this persistence resonates more with the industriousness of the well-formed hawk than with the fidelity of the beautifully plumed one. In contrast to Boccaccio’s “grazioso e bello” unhooded bird, Criseyde is not described as beautifully adorned; she is “fressh”—renewed from her time in the mews, regenerating her feathers. And this change of feathers signifies not a change of heart but a renewal of the agency to choose to greet Troilus. That she holds on to this “individual power” and “self-­ sovereignty” even as she pays obeisance demonstrates how we might read her as “control[ling] her excellence” for the reader’s benefit.63 Like Frederick’s well-formed and industrious hawks, she is faithful to her own decisions, her own forms of movement, which seem to bypass her role as “a narrative agent” 64 and speak directly to the audience. Her flight toward Troilus supports Carolynn Van Dyke’s explanation of how “Criseyde heightens her subjectivity by limiting it.”65 As in the case of the lady of the fabliau, Criseyde’s ultimate “sub66 jectivity lies outside the plot,” aiming for readerly consideration instead. The history of the mewed hawk trope helps us see how her “ful ofte” greeting and the freshness of her body resist interpretations of her as predictably adulterous and even redefine what the reader expects or wants from her. Criseyde confounds her readers’ ability to predict her actions based on her feathers because it is to the form beneath her feathers that she is loyal. She might have surface feathers that change and are controllable—by Pandarus and by Troilus—but beneath these, she adheres to her own form of representation, a form that Chaucer seems to revel in failing to convey. And 61. Crocker, Matter of Virtue, 59. 62. Crocker, Matter of Virtue, 55. 63. Crocker, “‘As false as Cressid,’” 314. 64. Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents, 204. 65. Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents, 200. 66. Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents, 204.

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that under-feather-form is not perceptible or legible, not even representable except by occupatio: How myghte it evere yred ben or ysonge, The pleynte that she made in hire destresse? I not; but, as for me, my litel tonge, If I discryven wolde hire hevynesse, It sholde make hire sorwe seme lesse Than that it was, and childisshly deface Hire heigh compleynte, and therfore ich it pace. (IV.799–805)

The narrator has no trouble describing the body that issues this “pleynte”: she rends her wavy sunlike hair; she wrings her slender fingers; she beats her white breast (IV.736–38; 752). And he does pen her complaint, for a full seven stanzas before admitting he cannot describe her woe. But his occupatio here casts doubt on his ventriloquizing efforts. Even as he attempts to convey her misery in having to leave Troilus, he can’t avoid giving her language that insinuates her changeability: “Thus, herte myn, for Antenor, allas, / I soone shal be chaunged, as I wene” (IV.792–93; emphasis added). His occupatio enhances the narrator’s humility topos, for clearly, by Book IV, no one can accuse him of “litel tonge.” But, more importantly, the occupatio betrays an inability to earnestly express Criseyde’s predicament in her own words—he can’t quite translate her voice into a legible language. This is, in part, because human language itself is unreliable, as Criseyde laments of Troilus’s ineffectual complaints: “‘Allas,’ quod she, ‘what wordes may ye brynge?’” (IV.857). What words do bring is not a precision but an excess of meaning, a final futility to represent her double bind. After futile attempts at language in her complaint in Book IV, Criseyde speaks as a hawk herself, pausing our interpretation at the moment of emergence from the mews, before we have a chance to determine that she’s flown the coop. Chaucer eschews occupatio in favor of granting Criseyde access to representation on a metanarrative level: she invokes the same metaphor that was used to describe her. In doing so, Chaucer taps into the literary history of the mewed hawk metaphor, putting that figurative language in Criseyde’s voice. Such a move does not curb the excess meaning of her words, but it does grant her agency through self-expression, in the same vein as the lady in the fabliau. Though Chaucer has used Criseyde’s speech throughout the poem to 67 “vest [her] with an excellence that she generates, manages, and protects,” this moment is unique in its resemblance to the cunning self-expression of 67. Crocker, Matter of Virtue, 55.

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the fabliaux tradition: Criseyde reappropriates the narrator’s metaphor in her own voice. During her numerous attempts to assuage Troilus’s grief about her “exchange” for Antenor, she insists that her proximity to Troilus will be “no ferther out of Troie / than [she] may ride ayeyn on half a morwe” and she won’t be out of his reach: So as I shal not so ben hid in muwe, That day by day, myn owne herte deere— Syn wel ye woot that it is now a trewe— Ye shal ful wel al myn estat yheere. And er that trewe is doon, I shal ben heere; And thanne have ye both Antenore ywonne And me also. Beth glad now, if ye konne. (Emphasis added, IV. 1310–16)

Chaucer here cites by negation romance heroine Fenice, who had no say in being “hid in muwe” when Cligès places her there alongside a molting hawk. Instead, Criseyde’s own voicing of the word “muwe” aligns her with the lady of the fabliau—the tension between Criseyde’s control over her body and her resistance to others’ control over it places the responsibility of ethical judgment with the reader, who, as Allen has suggested, “already judged her to be false” a priori.68 Reading Criseyde through the fabliau thus complicates the blame of her betrayal and the control of her body. Criseyde, like the lady from the fabliau, is caught in a situation that requires her careful deployment of speech to navigate through a double bind. And, like the lady in the fabliau, she is given a voice that further complicates an antifeminist reading of her description as a mewed “faucon.” Allen writes that Criseyde “has available only the language of change (metamorphosis, impossibility, reversal) to speak about perpetuity,” and I believe this “language of change” draws from the mews metaphor in Book III and the lady in Guillaume au faucon when she speaks of exchanging two words for one thing and one thing for two 69 words. By voicing the mews as a place—and even a metaphor—in which she refuses to be enclosed, she evokes the antifeminist history of the mews trope to reject it. She joins instead the alternative history enacted by the lady from the fabliau, reconfiguring the mews metaphor to resist control over how she is interpreted. Chaucer tricks his readers’ expectations and ears again with the “muwe”/“trewe” rhyme, and in so doing he uses poetic structure to demonstrate Criseyde’s double bind. He has allowed Criseyde to voice the word 68. Allen, “Flowing Backward to the Source,” 707. 69. Allen, “Flowing Backward to the Source,” 699.

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“trewe” to rhyme with “muwe,” though here she means “truce,” the cessation of battle that might allow for their reunion. She employs the rhyme that readers expected when she first utters “muwe” by voicing the homonym “trewe,” the very word readers want to hear coming from Criseyde’s lips, but not with the meaning her audience wants it to have. As if to further reiterate her meaning over the listener’s desired one, she repeats and clarifies “trewe” as “truce” again in line 5 of the stanza. This disconnect evokes the problem of misinterpretation and desire; like Troilus, readers want this word to signify something different from what she means by it. The narrator has allowed her to express the problem of interpretation: no matter what she says, readers want to hear something else, so her audience is not hearing what she actually says. Like Troilus, readers can’t process her attempt at fidelity because they interpret her words differently from what they mean. In fact, the concept of “hearing” her is one that Criseyde takes up in the middle of the stanza. The central homophonic rhyme “yheere”/“heere” enacts Claire Waters’s observation that, on both a stanzaic and a narrative level, “the most interesting work often takes place in the middle.”70 The BB hinge-rhyme in the middle of the rhyme royal stanza positions the words “yheere”/“heere” to span a beginning and an end. Criseyde’s subjectivity now straddles both the flight of rumor (you will hear about my status) and the solidity of promise (I shall be here). Criseyde continues to straddle two positions in epistolary form in Book V, where Crocker notes that “the stark recognition that she does not control her physical circumstance[s] is one of this poem’s most disturbing instances of pathos.”71 The tension between control and resistance occurs throughout the text— even when readers know that the poem is heading toward tragedy, they resist that ending to indulge in Criseyde’s speech and Chaucer’s description of her resistance to Pandarus’s pandering. Just as in the fabliau, in the Troilus, though the narrator is the first to compare the lady to a falcon, the lady’s voice reissues the comparison. The lady’s voicing of “faucon” in the fabliau and Criseyde’s voicing of “muwe” in the Troilus pass representation from the perspective of a male narrator to a female subject, suggesting an inversion of control over representation and judgment. Criseyde’s freshness upon emerging from the mews and her subsequent flight toward Troilus reimagines Machaut’s allegory from the perspective of the female object. Machaut’s allegory provides an inner monologue of masculine fear driven by loss of control over female bird, female lover, and the metaphor connecting the two. Le dit de l’alerion’s selfreflexive reference to the mewed falcon metaphor itself as an adornment, how 70. Waters, “Makyng and Middles in Chaucer’s Poetry,” 44. 71. Crocker, Matter of Virtue, 59.

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ever, allows readers to interpret the entire allegory in those terms: as changing feathers that adorn a body. The feathers are not in control of the body any more than his allegorical shroud can control the women beneath the surface layer of the allegory. Chaucer takes this discrepancy and experiments with applying the metaphor to Criseyde, and then he gives her the reins to guide readers’ interpretation of the metaphor and of her fidelity. Despite himself, Chaucer’s narrator cannot give preference to a loyal bird with perfectly legible feathers; like Machaut’s narrator, he conveys his simultaneous fear and awe of a bird that is loyal to the work of its own body—self-preservation in the narrative and in her legacy. Like the falconry treatise that prizes hawks of strong form over loyal ones, Troilus and Criseyde reconfigures expectations about fidelity to admire Criseyde’s spectacular flight and fight for control over how her actions and motives are interpreted. Perhaps this admiration is why, when the Troilus’s dedicatee John Gower composes his Cinkante Balades (1391–93), rife with falconry comparisons in the style of Machaut, he takes seriously Chaucer’s plea in the conclusion to the Troilus “to correcte” where “ned is” Chaucer’s “lytel” “tragedye” (V.1858, 1786). “Moral Gower”’s use of the falconry metaphor demonstrates that he finds it more ethically sound to remove the female body from the equation altogether (V.1856). Instead, the narrator of Gower’s eighth ballad invokes the mews in tandem with the immutability of his love: D’estable coer, qui nullement se mue, S’en ist ades et vole le penser Assetz plus tost qe falcon de sa Mue; Ses Eles sont souhaid et desirer, En un moment il passera la mer A vous, ma dame, u tient la droite voie, 72 En lieu de moi, tanque jeo vous revoie. (VIII. 1–7) [From the stable heart, which does not at all change/molt, / the thought goes away and flies / much more quickly than the falcon from its Mews; / its Wings are wish and desire, / in a moment it passes the sea / to you, my lady, where it takes the right path, / in my place, until I see you again.]

Gower uses the “falcon” emerging from the mews as a metaphor for his thoughts flying away from him toward his beloved. Here, the fact that the 72. This quotation from Cinkante Balades follows Yeager’s edition, whose translation I have used as a guide for my own.

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hawk does not return to its source bodes well for the message of love. He sidesteps the potential for anxious interpretation of female fidelity by redirecting the mewed hawk metaphor inward to a formless object—thoughts. But in doing so, he invokes what the ladies of these adultery narratives communicated to their audiences about their double bind. Free from the constraints of patriarchal misogyny, Gower metaphorizes his thoughts without implicating his body; for women, there is no such freedom in representation. By granting their female characters a voice and by using that voice to reconfigure metaphors that implicate female bodies, these adultery narratives allow for a freedom of interpretation for the benefit of the reader and even, perhaps, for the kinds of people the characters represent. For, once readers know they are entering into an adultery narrative, on some level and despite Chaucer’s attempts to stall the inevitable, they cannot help but read backwards from betrayal. But if they read betrayal backwards through the mewed hawk metaphor, readers can choose to interpret misogynistic valences as adornments and free-range flight as its own kind of fidelity.

CONCLUSION

•

Healing Squire’s Tale, Metonymy, and Female Falconers

As part of my research for this book, I participated in a three-day falconry apprentice workshop in Marysville, California. Running this workshop were three licensed falconers, all women. Until I met these women and their hawks, the reality of falconry training existed only in my reader’s mind, or, if I was lucky, at a drive-by distance, as when I would catch a glimpse of a jessed falcon and its human partner in a roadside field. At this workshop, master falconer and artist Marya Lehman brought the practice of falconry into tangible and proximate reality for me. She guided my fingers over the keel of a hawk’s breastbone to feel its weight and consequent flight-readiness; she instructed me on tying the falconer’s knot one-handed and cutting jesses from leather; she pointed to hunger traces on molted plumage and carved into the weak point on the shaft to demonstrate how to imp broken feathers. But I learned about falconers’ intuition in small, barely perceptible moments: her shoulders, elbow, feet, and even her breath shifted subtly to anticipate her hawk’s movements and needs while it sat, hooded, on her glove. Having only read accounts and theories of falconry training, I saw in these moments of accommodation the palpable connection between hawk and human. The intuition that has served Marya in handling and healing hawks, arriving at diagnoses and cures that sometimes eluded veterinary professionals, is, I think, linked to the hawking women depicted in poetry of the Middle Ages and, in particular, one little-recognized female falconer: Canacee of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale. • 167 •

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In the wake of Susan Crane’s lecture “For the Birds” at the 2010 New Chaucer Society Congress, Chaucerian scholars have re-examined the importance of the anthropomorphic relationship based on a specifically empathetic accommodation between the princess Canacee and a female hawk in the Squire’s Tale.1 Stepping back, the final reading in this book considers how the interspecies dynamic in Chaucer’s work emerges from a literary tradition of representing women through and with their birds. When E. Jane Burns asks us to consider “how female voices, fashioned by a male author to represent misogynous fantasies of female corporeality, can also be heard to rewrite the tales in which they appear,” she describes an archive consisting of human characters.2 But this method of reading, when coupled with the “faucon” as an overt symbol for female anatomy described in the previous chapter, brings the stakes of both feminist and critical animal studies together. In these last pages, I’d like to conclude with the image of the female falconer in poetic narrative to end on the questions at the heart of this book: What do women know about hawks and falconry that is unique to their sex? How do male authors represent this knowledge, changing their texts’ portrayal of power and gender in the process? Posing these questions risks essentializing women’s nature as animal-like, reinscribing prejudices against women through this act of saming. In their discussion of female scientists’ discoveries of chimpanzees’ capacity for grieving and interspecies bonding, Lori Gruen and Kari Weil acknowledge this essentializing paradox. When making the claim that women can perceive nonhuman animals in ways men cannot, scholars “risk being accused of essentializing women’s ways of knowing or reinscribing an age-old image of woman 3 as somehow more animal or ‘close to nature’ and therefore less human.” Yet “saming also exposes the anthropocentric prejudices that subtend the very notion of rights and the recognition of who or what deserves them. Saming and othering are related to each other as practices from the anthropocentric 4 and often patriarchal frames through which we see the world.” Through their hawks’ reversed sexual dimorphism and their practice of accommodation, the hawking women represented in the literature of the Middle Ages offer an alternative to patriarchal and anthropocentric interpretive practices. The feminist poetics that Hawking Women has traced from Frederick II’s treatise 1. Crane, “For the Birds.” See especially Kordecki, “Squire’s Tale: Romancing Animal Magic”; Deutch Schotland, “Avian Hybridity in ‘The Squire’s Tale’”; Gutmann, “Chaucer’s Chicks.” 2. Burns, Bodytalk, 7, 16. 3. Gruen and Weil, “Animal Others,” 480. 4. Gruen and Weil, “Animal Others,” 480.

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to Chaucer’s narrative poetry foregrounds a metonymic relationship between handler and hawk rather than a metaphorical one; it decenters the anthropomorphic frame and allows us to talk about saming without the discriminatory and hierarchical effect of othering. In other words, the hermeneutics of falconry places women in a relationship of contiguity rather than of subordination or substitution. This kind of reading rejects the substitution of avian body for female body. Rather, reading through falconry focalizes the connection between avian body and human body, privileging metonymic extension over metaphoric substitution. For women represented by and with falcons, the consequences of such a reading include choosing to see themselves as autonomous, rather than subordinate, beings. I have already discussed how the symbolic hierarchy between human and hawk weakens especially when both participants are gendered female, as in chapter 2’s seal iconography and sonnet voiced by a hawking woman. Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale ends with an interaction that replaces hierarchy with a feminist poetics of metonymy: the princess Canacee accommodates, first in her lap and then in her bedroom, a lovelorn and lyricizing peregrine falcon. In the tale, the initial placement of woman and bird evokes the hierarchy of the avian world, in which the alpha female occupies the highest spatial position: Canacee walks beneath a tree in which “sat a faucon over hir heed ful hye” (V.411).5 But the space between them diminishes as the falcon falls in a swoon from branch to branch. Canacee, in an anticipatory move that resembles the falconer’s intuition described in the opening to this chapter, “heeld hir lappe abrood, for wel she wiste / the faukon most fallen fro the twiste [branch]” (V.441–42). The separation between human handler and avian companion then dissipates once the falcon “fil to grounde anon / And lith aswowne, deed and lyk a stoon, / Til Canacee hath in hire lappe hir take” (V.473–75). Canacee’s interaction with the female peregrine increasingly resembles that of a falconer healing a hawk: But Canacee hom bereth hire in hir lappe, And softely in plastres gan hire wrappe, Ther as she with hire beek hadde hurt hirselve. Now kan nat Canacee but herbes delve Out of the ground, and make salves newe Of herbes preciouse and fyne of hewe, To heelen with this hauk. Fro day to nyght 5. References to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are from the Riverside edition and are cited in text by fragment and line number.

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She dooth hir bisynesse and al hire myght. And by hire beddes heed she made a mewe. (V.635–43) [But Canacee bears her [the peregrine] home in her lap, / and softly began to wrap her in bandages / where she had hurt herself with her beak. / Now Canacee can do nothing but dig herbs out of the ground / and make new salves of herbs, precious and fine of hue, / with which to heal this hawk. / From day to night she does her diligence and all her might / and by her bed’s 6 head she made a mews.]

While a magic ring that allows Canacee to understand birds’ language and to heal ailments with herbs might cast a fantastical patina on this section of the tale, Canacee’s actions are not different from those of actual falconers. Canacee receives the falcon in her lap, interprets its suffering, heals it with herbs, and constructs a mews for it. All these interactions were conventional steps in phases of falconry training and constitute the initial relationship between falcon and falconer. In its depiction of human–hawk relations, the Squire’s Tale combines two narrative tropes: the falconer–falcon interaction just described and anthropomorphic avian speech (the falcon talks). In other bird-speak texts, such as Chaucer’s own Parliament of Fowls or the anonymous debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale, when birds speak, they do so in their own world without the interruption of human locutors (besides, perhaps, the observing narrator as voyeur). The Squire’s Tale is unique not for its inclusion of both human and avian speaking characters7 but for its intertwining of avian and human narratives—the point is not that the bird can speak to the human and the marvel ends there; the falcon’s lament becomes its own romance couched in Canacee’s romance. Understanding Canacee as a falconer enables a different interpretation of the falcon’s lament. Rather than approaching the avian micro-romance as an anthropomorphic oddity, the lament promotes metonymic relationships and reading practices over metaphoric ones. I have already argued throughout this book that the hawk exists as an extension of the falconer and vice versa; the Squire’s Tale combines both the trope of the hawking woman in narrative poetry and the consequences of sexual dimorphism for poetic form. 6. To highlight the sequence of Canacee’s actions, I have offered a modern English translation of the passage. 7. Medieval narratives involving parrots are an interesting variation on this formula: “The parrot’s well-known capacity for mimicry turns a spotlight on quotation as a practice and raises questions about its nature. For while parrots can repeat what they have heard, it is unclear to what extent they know what they are saying” (Kay, “Monolingualism of the Parrot,” 24).

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Lyricizing her betrayal from Canacee’s lap elides the hawking woman with the female avian voice, epitomizing the metonymic connection between hawk and handler. The falcon’s lament employs a structure of woe, condemnation, narrative of betrayal, and retreat into memory, resembling the much shorter sonnet described in chapter 2. And, like the sonnet, it uses subtle metonymic moments to pull the listener or reader into those memories. The falcon laments the male tercelet’s dissemblance, which relies on a metaphoric substitution: saying one thing and meaning something else. The falcon effectively denounces the deception of metaphor when she describes the tercelet’s modus operandi: his “treson” and “falseness” were “so wrapped under humble cheere, / and under hewe of trouth in swich manere / [. . .] That, save the feend, noon wiste what he mente” (V.506–22). Michaela Paasche Grudin notes that the tercelet’s aim is “to subvert the accepted purpose of speech itself ” by saying exactly “what he does not mean.”8 By the end of her lament, though, the falcon changes tone. Instead of deriding the tercelet, as she did in the beginning, she remembers the good times: “he were gentil born, and fressh and gay, / And goodlich for to seen, and humble and free” (V.622–23). Returning to this memory of her beloved before he turned false, she takes control of the experience by controlling the poem. Charles Owen remarks that with her ending, “the whole experience is again present,” and its presence comes into existence through poetry’s ability to reach back into memory and create a poetic tempo9 rality. The falcon here realizes “that her despair at his sudden fall from grace cannot be assuaged by remembering [the tercelet] as a base deceiver.”10 Rather, the falcon shows how grief can best be processed by poetic expression, including a retreat into the memory of a devotional love. Owen argues that the last lines “show a change that has been brought about by the complaint itself, by 11 the very articulation of what had originally been mere cries of woe.” Finally, then, the lament is able to do something that only poetry can: take something inexpressible and give it legible form. In a tale that has been criticized as ending in increasing illegibility, this is not an insignificant feat for the lament to accomplish. Nevertheless, critics remain skeptical of and perplexed by the falcon’s lament, viewing it as a confused attempt at animal ventriloquism, or part of the Squire’s ploy to appear to sympathize with the ladies by depicting female companionship and empathy. Carolynn Van Dyke responds to the falcon episode with “uncertainty” about 8. Grudin, Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse, 120. 9. Owen, “Falcon’s Complaint,” 183. 10. Owen, “Falcon’s Complaint,” 185. 11. Owen, “Falcon’s Complaint,” 185.

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the contradictory elements of the anthropomorphic metaphor: the “outwardly avian” “setting and characters” pales against the falcon’s “human” “points of reference.”12 She reads the falcon’s “human similitude” finally as “too imposed” 13 and the falcon “as a semiotic robot, a vehicle for the human imagination.” Yet the tale successfully conveys the extent to which Canacee’s interaction with the falcon’s poem subsumes her. The falcon’s critique of metaphor makes it possible to read her not as a bird metaphorically substituting for a bereaved lover but instead as something in between a metaphor and a lyrical speaker— an extension of both but not subordinate to either human character or semiotic service. The lament is framed with a specifically metonymic interaction between Canacee and the falcon: first their physical closeness and then the mews that Canacee builds “by hire beddes heed” (V.643). She interprets the creature through its sorrowing, harmed “gentil herte” (V.452), and the result is a compassionate elision of their two bodies, first from so much “routhe” upon hearing the falcon’s initial shriek that “almoost [Canacee] deyde,” and then from bearing the falcon’s body in Canacee’s own lap (V.438; V.441). The falcon acknowledges Canacee’s noble status by observing that “gentil herte kitheth gentillesse” appearing to rely on empathy for communication (V.483). Crane has pointed out how the “metonymy of gentle hearts elides the physical difference between princess and peregrine” but also notes that this elision is based on aristocratic affinity.14 If we step back and consider that the falcon is narrating her lament from a position of literal attachment to her listener, Canacee, there is a second kind of communication happening, one that doesn’t derive from their shared “gentil” status alone. The precepts of falconry dictate that the falconer anticipate and accommodate the bird’s needs while it sits on her fist, and she must do so by adopting the perspective of the bird and by making her own body a perch for it: Et quando per motus repentinos in tota persona, aut in membris, timetur ne se diverberet, postquam faciat aliquod de signis dictis, falconarius non faciat hos motus. Et si indigebit facere, prius apponat tiratorium in pedibus falconis, et prius gustet falco de ipso quam faciat aliquem de motibus, quibus indiget, et tunc suaviter moveat ad sedendum se, ad inclinandum, ad surgendum, ad girandum se dextrorsum vel sinistrorsum, ad eundum, ad tussiendum et sternutandum. (448.17–23) 12. Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents, 82. 13. Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents, 86–87. 14. Crane, “For the Birds,” 126.

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[And when one fears that the hawk bates [beats its wings while its feet are tied down] due to sudden movements of the [falconer’s] body or limbs, the falconer, after the falcon demonstrates some of the signs discussed, should not perform these movements. And if the falconer cannot avoid [moving], she should first offer the tiring [ration of meat] to the falcon’s talons and wait for the falcon to eat it before making any movements. Only then can the falconer herself move slowly to sit down, bend, get up, turn right or left, walk, cough, and sneeze.]

It is from Canacee’s own body that she hears the falcon’s 131-line lament, and we are reminded of this fact once the lament is finished: “And with that word this faucon gan to crie / And swowned eft in Canacees barm” (V.630–31). The lament resounded from the listener’s own body, marking a metonymic connection between poem and listener. When reading from this metonymic position, it is possible to move beyond the anthropomorphic metaphor and love triangle in the falcon’s story in favor of the present connection: the falcon’s cries and Canacee’s lap—the poet’s voice and the listener’s body. And in fact, the very next thing Canacee does with her body is build a mews to host the falcon, enshrining her lament on its walls and preserving the connection between them. The metonymic relationship in the lament is that between the falcon and her audience, Canacee and, by extension, the reader. Her lamentation, like the sonnet, exists formally as a metonymic structure in relation to the surrounding tale and collection of tales. It is separate from but connected to the story the Squire tells, which is separate from but connected to the other stories in the Canterbury Tales. But what this tale does specifically that the other tales do not do is demonstrate how a storyteller can get wrapped up and lost in his own story to the point that he is interrupted and forced to snap out of it. Other tales are interrupted for their long-winded moral agendas, at odds with the Host’s dual purview of “sentence” and especially “solaas” (I.798). But the Squire’s Tale is interrupted because the Squire seems to get lost within his own story, and he does so after his detour into the falcon’s lament and her final resting place, the mews that Canacee, another witness to the falcon’s lament, constructs. The Squire’s Tale suggests that the love triangle itself is not the subject of the falcon’s tale; it is the relationship between the lament and its listener that is the point of the entire tale—the poetic interlude is the “knotte why that every tale is toold” (V.401). Canacee takes the lament and creates a material extension of it when she builds the mews, which depicts the bereavement felt by the falcon with its mural of chattering magpies. Like La Nina Siciliana’s poetic death that could only find expression in poetry, Canacee represents the

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falcon’s misery with her own art form, rendered poetry by the frame of the Squire’s ekphrastic description of the mural. The Squire’s Tale conjoins the falcon’s lament to the mews to create a poetic space just big enough for teller and listener to get lost in. Chapter 3’s discussion of Yonec demonstrated how a confinement can also provide an expansion when that confinement stands in for reading practice. To be sure, reading the mews as a cage creates an end result of subordination, lack of agency, and human domination. But the mews is not represented as a cage, and it was not understood culturally as a cage. Reading the mews as a metaphorical cage reproduces the interpretive problems posed by the use of metaphor—it obscures the hermeneutic function of the mews and its connection to the other elements of the tale. Bonnie Wheeler notes the utility of metonymy in Chaucer’s verse to “expose cognitive gaps which would otherwise remain concealed in the imprecision of metaphors.”15 Reading the mews as an “answere” (V.152) to the “menyng” (V.151) of the lament helps us view the lament itself as the “knotte” and the mews as part of the purpose “that every tale is toold” (V.401). The lament and the mews are all part of a larger poetic project between poem and reader. While the lament provided the meaning for Canacee to know, the mews is Canacee’s answer, conjoined formally to the lament and narratively housing its speaker: She dooth hire bisynesse and al hire myght, And by hire beddes heed she made a mewe And covered it with veluettes blewe, In signe of trouth that is in wommen sene. Al withoute, the mewe is peynted grene, In which were peynted alle thise false fowles, As ben thise tidyves, tercelettes, and owles; Right for despit were peynted hem bisyde, Pyes, on hem for to crie and chyde. Thus let I Canacee hir hauk kepyng; I wol namoore as now speke of hir ryng . . . (V.642–52)

The mews’s mural renders visible the falcon’s warning about metaphor and painted speech: the words “peynted” and “grene” warn viewers of the “false fowles” like the tercelet of the falcon’s lament. Crane rightly judges the mews as an “attempt at hosting without taking hostage,” an attempt at “express[ing] compassion for a bird,” and eloquently if somewhat mysteriously ends her 15. Wheeler, “Trouthe without Consequences,” 93.

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analysis of the tale by “imagin[ing] that Canacee condenses Chaucer’s artistic project into her mew.”16 Reading the mews specifically as an extension of the falcon’s lament, which enacted a relationship between Canacee and the falcon, between falconer and falcon, audience and storyteller, explicates that project. As a metonymic structure founded on contiguity without subordination, the mews requires participation without domination. The mews suspends the narrative ending to the love triangle and privileges instead the poetic space of a memory lamented. The falcon, connected to Canacee, reclaims at least her own ability of expression and keeps the reader with her in that suspended space of poetic time. The mews depicts Canacee’s reception of the lament as a reliquary for the “felte deeth” of the falcon (V.566). Like the lament, the mews allows the reader to step out of time from the rest of the narrative and find her own “answere” to the poem. Canacee dedicates all “hire bisyness and al hire myght” to the enterprise of interpretation, a shift in perspective but not a substitutive perspective. She is not taking over the falcon’s lament and making her mews stand in for it. And I wonder whether this kind of metonymic reaction might help us read the Franklin’s interruption and subsequent tale of Dorigen, who has a lament of her own, as an extension of the Squire’s “knotte.” The lament and mews show how one might “answere” back without “quiting” or ousting, which denotes hierarchy, substitution. This is a different way to consider the tales and their contiguous positioning and relation with one another, each one as shifting, but not substituting, the perspective of the last. Returning briefly to the fourteenth-century conduct manual from the introduction, Le Ménagier di Paris, offers more context for the sequence of interactions between Canacee and the falcon. The Ménagier details a strange simulation that takes an intimate turn during early phases of training, positioning the handler and hawk as literal bedfellows. This moment opens up the possibility for women to extend control over their bodies from the bedroom to the lectern and vice versa. The manual instructs that “de nuyt soi mis l’esprevier entre deux draps au lit couchié avec une personne pour garder chaleur naturelle” (3.2.209–10;17 at night, the young bird should be put between two sheets in bed with someone to retain its natural warmth).18 If the hawk represents male genitals, then this moment in the Ménagier would promote the patriarchal ideology of the entire conduct manual, but the text makes it a point to indicate distinctly different terms for male and female birds: “De 16. Crane, “For the Birds,” 133; 135–36. 17. Quotations from Le Ménagier de Paris are from the Brereton and Ferrier edition and are cited in text by book, part, and line number. 18. Greco and Rose, Good Wife’s Guide, 236.

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l’esprevier le mouchet est le masle [. . .] et d’autres comme la’austour, le faucon, etc., l’en dit le masle tercelet” (3.2.906–8; The male sparrowhawk is the musket [.  .  .] and of others such as the goshawk, falcon, etc., the male is called the tercelet).19 In this case, if “l’espervier entre deux draps” (the bird between two sheets) represents a gendered body part, it is a distinctly female bird, and therefore enables a moment of metonymic and autonomous control. Interpreting Canacee as a female falconer dreaming beside her falcon’s mews allows readers to linger in the relationship between falcon and falconer, which this final scene depicts as one of female autonomy: both the bird and the trainer are emphatically female, avoiding the control of potential male lovers. That the mews structure also depicts on its walls the story of the peregrine’s suffering, the story that bound the peregrine and Canacee in empathetic “wommanly benignytee,” seems to remove both Canacee and her bird from the sphere of male management and even from a heteronormative plot (V.486). The phase of falconry training that allows Canacee and the hawk to spend time together in the mews replaces the objective of that training— the hunt. If Canacee bonds with the peregrine for no obvious or traditional purpose, such as hunting, she engages with the bird for another motive less perceptible. In this space Canacee bonds with the peregrine not to assert her dominance over the animal but to recraft the substitutional stand-in of falcon for woman as falcon with woman. The Ménagier ends its advice to young wives with the suggestion that the reader “l’en le mue bien sur le poing” (3.2.1048–49; can molt [the hawk] while holding it on the fist).20 And the male narrator of the Squire’s Tale leaves Canacee there, in that perpetual state of molting on the fist, in the bed. He seems to have lost control of this narrative to Canacee: “Thus let I Canacee hir hauk kepyng,” the Squire trails off (V.651). The ensuing few lines seem in and out of the narrator’s control, bringing the hawk and her lover, the tercelet, together again, ushering in a battle for Canacee’s body that might end in incest. But the last line, “and there I lefte I wol ayeyn bigynne,” brings us right back to Canacee keeping her hawk, closing the circuit of control and release within the female falconer (V.670). Within the narrative, she performs the duty of a skilled falconer and empath—she cures her bird’s physical and emotional wounds. But on a metanarrative level, Chaucer’s choice of pairing Canacee and the female hawk repairs the harm to both species caused by the misogynistic literary symbol.

19. Greco and Rose, Good Wife’s Guide, 249–50. 20. Greco and Rose, Good Wife’s Guide, 252.

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This relative freedom for women, both in the practice of falconry and in its usage as a symbol, casts falconry in terms of accommodation rather than control. The Squire’s self-conscious bumbling as a narrator even makes explicit the fallibility of using falconry as a symbol of clear dominance. When hawks’ and women’s bodies are textualized and represented in a genre invested in female chastity, their metonymic connection is significant. Gruen and Weil address the significance for feminist scholarship of such a symbiosis: “To tend to an animal, to respond to her is to change her as it is to be changed by her in return. The ‘difficulty of ethical responsibility’ is that we must accept it in the face of uncertain changes. Feminists, we think, are not afraid of such complexities nor shamed by our entanglements with others we cannot fully know.”21 The representations of hawking women throughout this book do not seek to overcome the unknowability of other species, nor do they shy away from the entanglement. The failure of dominance between species and between genders finally brings us back to the ballad “Pluk of her bellys” discussed in the introduction. This poem attempts to pair failed falconry training with a litany of antifeminist arguments, aligning hawks’ wandering nature with women’s behavior. But 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. In this light, conduct manuals like Le Ménagier di Paris, allegorical treatises such as Le dit de l’alerion, and romances like the Squire’s Tale seem to parody the usage of falconry as a control mechanism rather than use it to effectively communicate a hierarchical relationship. But even when the birds are not present, I believe it is possible to use the relationship outlined in falconry to reconfigure relationships of gendered control in literary texts. In consideration of the quotidian proximity to falconry birds, to the countless hours spent in their company, and of the inevitable impact such proximity had on people’s understanding of their world, feminist approaches to medieval texts might consider the hermeneutics of control in falconry even in the absence of the birds.

21. Gruen and Weil, “Animal Others,” 482.

APPENDIX

•

A Guide to Terminology

In its aim to discuss the influence of falconry training on medieval literary culture, this book uses terminology that may be unfamiliar to its readers. Most of us do not live alongside and train birds of prey, so to move beyond simply explicating allusions used in literature, I want this book to give readers an immersive understanding of how the nuances of falconry altered the perspective of those for whom it was commonplace. Medieval treatises, modern falconers, and raptor conservation centers provided me the language and understanding to discuss training phases, avian anatomy and physiology, and 1 nomenclature. Below is a brief guide to that language.

THE BIRDS Austringer: specifically, a trainer of accipiters only (rather than of longwings, or falcons). 1. I am indebted to the Audubon Nature Center in Henderson, Kentucky; the California Raptor Center in Davis, California; East Sussex Falconry in Wartling, United Kingdom; Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Kempton, Pennsylvania; West Coast Falconry in Marysville, California; and Wesselman Woods Nature Preserve in Evansville, Indiana. The following falconers offered their time and expertise in explaining the phases and terminology behind falconry training: Jana Barkley, Jack Hubley, Amber Rae Kelley, Marya Lehman, Gabriel Long, Kate Marden, and Gerard and Gemma Sulter. • 179 •

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Falconer: generally, the human partner in falconry. Specifically, a trainer of falcons (longwings). I use this term generally to refer to handlers of all falconry birds except when austringer is specified in the text. Falconry: I use the term falconry to designate the practice of training birds of prey to hunt with humans, and to discuss the manuals describing the training of all falconry birds. Falconry birds: Strictly speaking, there are three categories of falconry birds, or birds of prey trained to hunt alongside humans. This is leaving aside eagles and owls, which many modern falconers train. Accipiters: shortwings, i.e., goshawks or sparrowhawks. Buteos: broadwings, i.e., red-tailed hawks in the Americas or buzzards in Europe. This category is not discussed in a medieval context, but it is helpful to know that New World Buteos hunt in a pack, which distinguishes them from medieval Old World falconry birds, which are naturally solitary hunters. Falcons: longwings, i.e., peregrines, gyrfalcons (a species native to the arctic), or sakers (a species native to desert and grassland climates). Hawks: While all three of the above can be called hawks in nontechnical parlance, only a longwing can ever be called a falcon. I use the term hawk to designate falconry birds broadly, unless species are identified in the literature. Hawking: I use the term hawking to designate the action of hunting with birds of prey. Hence, one practices falconry but goes hawking. Hunting styles: Accipiters and Buteos primarily hunt in wooded areas, killing their prey on the ground by strangulation with the incredible pressure of their grip. Falcons primarily hunt in the air, killing their prey by diving with such an impact that they stun their prey and are then able to capture it with their talons. Falcons have a notch on their beaks called a tomial tooth that allows them to sever the spinal cord of their prey once in their grip. When hunting with humans, both styles rely on the human partner to flush out prey. Accipiters and Buteos may wait perched on tree branches, while falcons “wait on,” circling in the sky above the falconers.

RAPTOR LIFE CYCLE Brancher or ramage: a juvenile hawk that has learned to hunt and fly from the nest but still rests on branches near the nest, where its parents may have left food for it. Eyass or nestling: a very young hawk captured from the eyass, or nest. These birds are still fed by their parents and while they are the easiest to cap-

Appendix

ture, are not ideal falconry birds because they have not yet been taught to hunt by their own species. Haggard: an adult hawk that has already gone through one molt and therefore may be more difficult to habituate to human presence. Passage hawk: a juvenile hawk that is captured during its first migration, or passage, and is already a skilled and independent hunter; more difficult to capture than an eyass or brancher, but ideal to train for its balance of ready hunting skills and impressionability.

FALCONRY ACCOUTREMENTS Bells: A small metal bell was attached to the hawk’s tibia with leather strips (bewits) above the jesses. These bells had carefully sized holes to prevent birds from sticking their talons in them. Falconers used the sound of bells to alert them to the movement of hawks close by and to assist them in locating a bird that has flown a great distance. Today, telemetry tracking devices supplement the bell. Creance: a long, lightweight cord tied to the leash during initial training phases. The creance is long enough to allow the bird to fly greater distances between a perch and the glove or a lure. It provides extra tethering protection when the hawk is not fully trained and might fly off once released. Hood: Introduced to Europe by Arab falconers, the leather hood completely covers the hawk’s head and eyes and thus provides a means of reducing visual stimulation, which would excite the hawk and prompt it to either flee or harm itself during initial training phases. Even after the hawk is fully trained, falconers use the hood to calm the perched hawk before releasing it to fly, especially when surrounded by unpredictable activity. Jesses: short leather strips affixed to the hawk’s ankles that allow the falconer to keep the hawk from flying off the glove. While today falconers affix permanent leather anklets to the hawk’s feet and then thread jesses through metal holes in the anklets, in the Middle Ages, jesses alone were the primary means of connecting bird to handler. Longer tethering lines were attached to small metal rings knotted to the ends of jesses. Leash: a long leather leash attached to the rings of the jesses to tie the bird to its perch, to provide it slightly more leeway for taking a bath, or to tie it to a longer line (creance). Lure: a decoy device used to train the falcon to return from flight to the glove. It is made to resemble prey and is often covered with feathers or fur, or even dried wings sewn together. While still in initial train-

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ing phases, hawks are introduced to the lure indoors and made to eat directly on it so that they form an association between the lure and food. Once taken outside, the falconer uses a line attached to the lure to swing it in a circle while the hawk flies above, initially still attached to the creance. Meat can be affixed to both upper and lower sides of the lure, so that when a hawk alights upon it, it will be rewarded instantly. Mews: the indoor structure that houses hawks throughout their training: at first, in order to become habituated to humans, but also for protection at night and when the birds are molting. This space must be large enough to accommodate falconers and their assistants and the movement of birds flapping and hopping between perches of varying heights. Perch: the cylindrical bar on which hawks rest. Perches must be placed far enough from the ground and the wall to ensure that hawks don’t damage their wings or tails. Using the leash, falconers attach hawks to a lower or higher perch in the mews, depending on their phase of training. Falconers also construct perches and resting stools outside the mews in an outdoor training area. Tiring: the meaty leg of a bird used to entice the hawk to the glove. Tirings are larger than the meaty tidbits kept in the falconer’s pouch and may be dried out to use for longer periods of the training process.

FALCONRY ACTIONS Bating: Hawks that attempt to fly away while tethered to the glove or perch perform an action called “bating,” a sign of unrest, especially in the initial phases of training. Their tethered feet spring up and away from the perch or glove, and their wings flap aggressively, which could damage them. Bating could result in birds hanging upside down and entangling their jesses and leashes, as well as tiring them out or damaging their limbs. Manning: the phase of habituating hawks to being handled by humans. This is primarily done through two simultaneous methods: withholding sight initially, through the use of the hood and seeling; and offering food from the glove, in the form of bloody tidbits and the tiring. A hawk that is fully manned no longer needs to be blinded or enticed with a tiring to return to the glove. Mewing: Hawks shed their feathers once a year in a phase called molting. While they are molting, they are housed in the mews, and this resting and molting time is called mewing. As they are so vulnerable without

Appendix

their full sets of feathers, they are not brought outside for hunting. Their human contact is thus limited to mealtime, and they must be retrained to the fist once they finish molting. For this reason, many falconers choose to release their birds at the start of the molting season and begin again with new falconry birds after the season is over. Mounting: the flight action of rising on upward drafts of air to the optimal height for waiting on the falconer below to flush out prey. Seeling: Upon capture, hawks in the Middle Ages were placed in a tight-fitting sack called a sock to prevent them from seeing the faces of their captors. Their eyelids were then seeled, or sewn closed, by puncturing the bottom lid with a threaded needle and securing the threads together on the back of the head, pulling the eyelids shut. As they became habituated to humans and their surroundings in the dark mews, small amounts of candlelight were introduced gradually so that they could perceive unfamiliar shapes and shades, which they could detect even through the skin of their eyelids. Little by little as they became accustomed to their new surroundings and human attendants, their sutures were loosened and finally snipped so that they were fully sighted. Stooping: the flight action of diving at prey from the air. Weight management: The hungrier a hawk, the more likely it is to return to the fist. However, to prepare the bird for the hunt, the falconer must ensure that the hawk is strong enough for the flight and pursuit of prey but not so full that it does not feel motivation to hunt. The hawk’s crop, a throat pouch located above the breastbone, visibly bulges when it is full. While modern falconers discuss bringing a bird to the ideal weight in terms of grams checked via a digital scale, medieval falconers relied on tactile and visual perception only, observing the crop and feeling the keel, or breastbone of the bird, to determine whether it was the ideal hunting weight.

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INDEX

•

Accommodated Animal, The (Shannon), 14

Aquino, Rinaldo d’, 40

Adams, Tracy, 138–39, 141

Arabic, 41–43

Adelard of Barth, 34, 34nn33–34, 66, 83, 83n9, 83n11

Aristotle, 34–35, 35n39, 41, 51–52

adornment, 140–41, 147, 149, 151, 153, 160–61

artistic servitude, 49–50

Ars versificatoria (Matthew of Vendôme), 8

adultery narratives, 15–16, 97, 134–35, 137–40, 145, 154, 160, 166

Ashley, Kathleen, 10

aesthetics of falconry, 27, 36–47, 39 fig. 1.1, 49–54

Auchinleck Manuscript, 22, 102–4, 129n37, 132

Ashmole 61, 129, 129n37

agency, 11, 45, 123, 132, 138, 148–49, 151, 153–54, 159–62; lack of, 29, 116, 174

Averroes, 41

Akasoy, Anna, 41n54

Bahr, Arthur, 81

Albertus Magnus, 66–67

Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 66

alerion, 149

Bauer, Thomas, 43

Allen, Elizabeth, 155

Bedos-Rezak, Brigitte, 68–69, 72–73

Almond, Richard, 69

bells, 16–17, 59, 65, 74

“Alphabetical Praise of Women,” 104–5 Amer, Sahar, 42 animal, as category, 14 anthropomorphization, 26–29, 168–70, 172–73 Aquinas, Thomas, 38

Bernau, Anke, 128 Bertran de Born, 63 bird species: alerion, 149; eagle, 149, 155–56; falcon, 6, 18, 27–29, 36–37, 39 fig. 1.1, 43–47, 49, 53, 55, 60, 66, 72, 104, 109, 120–21, 123–25, 137–45, 154–57, 158 fig. 5.3, 159, 164–65, 169–76; gyrfalcon, 38, 49,

• 195 •

196

Index

50, 56 fig. 2.1, 104, 149, 155–56; gyrkin, 56 fig. 2.1; lanner falcon, 123–24; musket, 61, 176; parrot, 139–40, 170n7; peregrine falcon, 49, 55, 169–76; phoenix, 58n7, 135–7; saker falcon, 45–46, 49; sparrowhawk, 6, 16–17, 21, 54–55, 59–65, 76, 104, 124, 135, 137, 139–40, 149–50; tiercel, 6, 53, 55, 123–24 Birky, Robin Hass, 9 Bliss, A. J., 122, 129 Bloch, Howard, 142 BN fr 19152, 138–39, 141 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 18n70, 155, 161 Boccassini, Daniela, 4–5 Book of Memory, The (Carruthers), 108n12 Brewer, Keagan, 25n2 Budriesi, Anna Laura Trombetti, 29–30 Buigne, Gace de la, 30 Burns, E. Jane, 15–16, 140, 142, 168 Cadden, Joan, 52 Caldwell, Ellen M., 119n18 Campbell, Emma, 94–96 Canacee, 22, 167–76. See also Squire’s Tale (Chaucer) Cannon, Christopher, 51 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 3, 156n53, 173. See also Squire’s Tale (Chaucer)

composition, 4, 35, 39–40 conduct books, 3, 6, 9–10, 12–13, 16, 22, 124– 25, 138, 175, 177 Contes del Graal, La (Chrétien de Troyes), 140n18 control, 3, 17, 63–64, 68–72, 84, 89–91, 93, 95, 105, 108–9, 112, 114, 119–20, 126–27, 132– 37, 140–41, 144–55, 159–65; and release, 2, 6–7, 12, 44–54, 70, 78–79, 175–77 Cooper, Lisa H., 7–8 Crane, Susan, 168 creance, 20, 74–75 Criseyde, 28, 153–65. See also Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer) Crocker, Holly, 13, 124, 132, 145, 160 De animalibus (Aristotle), 34 De arte bersandi (On the Art of Deer Hunting) (attrib. Guicennas), 30–31, 30n19 De arte honeste amandi (The Art of Courtly Love) (Capellanus), 28 De arte venandi cum avibus. See Liber de arte venandi cum avibus (Book on the Art of Hunting with Birds) (Frederick II Hohenstaufen) De avibus tractatus (Adelard of Barth), 34, 83, 83n9 De Marco, Nicola, 20, 20n73

Canzoniere, 57–58, 59n8, 78

De Proprietatibus Rerum (Bartholomaeus Anglicus), 66

Capellanus, Andreas, 28

De Sanctis, Francesco, 61

Carruthers, Mary, 108n12

Decamerone, Il (Boccaccio), 18n70

categories, 47–53

Derrida, Jacques, 143–44

Chaganti, Seeta, 8, 86n18 chastity, 4, 9, 119n18, 157, 160, 177 Chastoiement des dames, Les (Robert de Blois), 6 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 3, 28, 134, 146, 153–66, 156n53, 160n59, 167–74, 176–77 Chrétien de Troyes, 123n22, 134–37, 155 Cinkante Balades (Gower), 165–66 Clark, Robert L. A., 10

Didascalicon (Hugh of St. Victor), 35 Dit de l’alerion (The Tale of the Alerion) (Machaut), 26, 146–53, 147 fig. 5.1, 148 fig. 5.2, 164–65, 177 Dit de l’alerion, Le (Machaut), 3 Dodds, Lara, 15 dogs, in hunting, 31–33 Dowd, Michelle M., 15 dynamic space, 86n18

Claustrophilia (Howie), 84 Cligès (Chrétien de Troyes), 135–37

eagle, 149, 155–56

Cobby, Elizabeth, 145

eating, 111n14

Index Edwards, Suzanne, 3, 118, 126, 126n28

Grudin, Michaela Paasche, 171

El-Kamil, Malik, 42, 42n61, 48n73

Gruen, Lori, 56, 168

Esope (attrib. Marie de France), 81, 81n2

Grunman-Gaudet, Minnette, 156n53

Eucharisticos (Paulinus of Pella), 35n39

Guicennas, 30, 30n19

Eurydice, 103–4, 127–32

Guillaume au faucon, 137–46, 155

197

Gutmann, Sara, 28–29 fabliau, 11, 22, 23n75, 134, 137–46

Guy of Warwick, 104

falcon, 6, 18, 44–47, 49, 104, 120–21, 123–25, 137–45, 154–59, 169–76; gender of, 27–29, 53, 55, 60, 156

gyrfalcon, 38, 49, 50, 56 fig. 2.1, 104, 149, 155–56

Falcons and Falconry (Illingworth), 27–28 faucon, 3–4, 137–46, 158 fig. 5.3 feathers, molted, 133. See also mewing feminism, 55–57, 104, 132, 134–35, 140–42, 144, 163, 168–69, 177 Fenice, 135–37, 144, 156, 163. See also Cligès (Chrétien de Troyes) Ferrières, Henri de, 30 Filostrato (Boccaccio), 155–56, 161

gyrkin, 56 fig. 2.1 H Is for Hawk (Macdonald), 1–2 Harley 978, 81, 83–89, 83n10, 90, 92–93, 97–98, 101 Harley 3810, 129, 129n37 Harris, Carissa, 16, 145 Haskins, Charles Homer, 25n5, 41, 48n73 Heurodis, 104, 106, 114–27. See also Sir Orfeo

flight, 39–41, 50–51, 64–65, 126–27

Hieatt, Claudette, 156n53

form, 8, 36, 51–52, 57–59, 79, 85, 93, 97, 99–100, 137–38, 173–74; and feminism, 15. See also matter

hood, 39, 42, 49, 51, 74, 155–57, 158 fig. 5.3, 159, 161, 167 Horne Child and Maiden Rimnild, 105

Frederician fresco, 4–6, 5 fig. 0.2

Howie, Cary, 84, 95

Frederick II Hohenstaufen: as authority on falconry, 4–5, 24–30, 33–34, 33n31, 34–43, 45–53, 55, 65–66, 72–74, 151, 168–69; as imperial figure, 5 fig. 0.2; as patron, 41

Hugh of St. Victor, 35

Frese, Dolores, 96–97

human, as category, 14 hunting, hawking vs., 30–37 Hypatia, 55–56

Fumo, Jamie C., 31 Fyfe, Marjorie, 27–28, 42n61

Ibn al-Mu’tazz, 43 Ibn Fadl Allah, Shihab al-Din, 44

Galvez, Marisa, 5

Illingworth, Frank, 27

gender hierarchy, 53, 60, 78. See also sexual dimorphism

Isabella of England, 4–5

In the Skin of the Beast (McCracken), 14

gender performance, 10–11 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 8–9, 36, 46–47, 50 glove, 5, 16, 51, 75, 105–6; how to position, 67–68; image of, 69, 70 fig. 2.2, 71 fig. 2.3, 72–73, 146, 147 fig.5.1, 158 fig. 5.3, 159

jesses, 28, 51, 59–60, 65, 72, 74, 77–78, 93, 167 John of Garland, 8 Johnson, Lesley, 23n75, 145

Gower, John, 165–66 grammar, preceptive, 8n26

Kelly, Douglas, 35

Greco, Gina L., 10

Kendall, Elliot, 107

Grilli, Francesca, 1, 2 fig. 0.1

King Richard, 104

198

Index

Klein, Melanie, 134

Ménagier de Paris, Le, 6–7, 9–12, 175, 177

knowledge, 55–56

Metamorphoses (Ovid), 131

Krueger, Roberta, 16, 140, 145

metaphor, 2–4, 10, 15–16, 19, 22–23, 26–27, 58, 61, 63, 71, 75, 77, 104–5, 133–49, 153–66, 169–74

La Nina Siciliana. See “Tapina in me ch’amava uno sparvero” (Wretched me, who loved a sparrowhawk)

metonymy, 22–23, 95, 100, 146, 169–77 mewing, 133–34, 137, 146–54, 157

Lais, 80–82, 81n2, 82n8, 89–90, 92–93, 97, 101, 103, 129n34, 138

Meyer, Kenneth, 55

lanner falcon, 123–24

miscellany, 81

Laskaya, Anne, 129 Lay le Freyne, 129n34 Lentini, Giacomo da, 58 Liber de arte venandi cum avibus (Book on the Art of Hunting with Birds) (Frederick II Hohenstaufen), 4, 8–9, 24–30, 34–41, 39 fig. 1.1, 43–53, 55, 56 fig. 2.1, 65–66, 73–74, 108–11, 111 fig. 4.1, 111n14, 113 fig. 4.2, 124, 127, 151, 168–69; BnF MS Fr 12400, 38, 39 fig. 1.1, 56 fig. 2.1; Bologna MS Lat. 419, 48–49; ms. X, 48; Vatican MS Pal. Lat. 1071, 48

mirror valve, 157–59, 158 fig. 5.3 molted feathers, 133. See also mewing Mostacci, Jacopo, 40 MS Ashmole 61, 129, 129n37 MS BN fr 19152, 138–39, 141 MS Harley 978, 81, 83–89, 83n10, 90, 92–93, 97–98, 101 MS Vaticano Latino 3793, 57, 59n8, 62n14 Mueller, Helmut C., 55 Murphy, James J., 8n26 musket, 61, 176

light, 113–16 Livre de chasse (Book of the Hunt) (Phoebus), 30, 32

Newlin, Robert, 154

Livre du roi Modus et de la reine Ratio (The Book of King Method and Queen Theory) (Ferrières), 30

Oelze, Anselm, 114

lure, 3, 27n7, 51, 74–75, 134, 136

Orléans, Simon d’, 40

Oggins, Robin S., 18n70 Orpheus, 103–4. See also Sir Orfeo

Macdonald, Helen, 1–2

Ovid, 131

Machaut, Guillaume de, 3, 26, 134, 146–53, 160

Owen, Charles, 171

Magnus, Albert, 114 Mallette, Karla, 41 Malpezzi Price, Paola, 58n5, 58n7, 61 manning, 20, 49, 67–68 Marie de France, 80–81, 81n2, 89–102, 105, 129n34, 138n10, 174

Owen, Lewis J., 122–23 Owl and the Nightingale, The, 170 Palazzo Finco fresco, 4–6, 5 fig. 0.2 Parisiana poetria (John of Garland), 8 Parliament of Fowls (Chaucer), 170

Marrocco, W. Thomas, 18n70

parrot, 139–40, 170n7

matter, 51–52

Patterson, Shirley Gale, 140, 140n18

Matthew of Vendôme, 8

Paulinus of Pella, 35n39

McCracken, Peggy, 3, 14, 97, 100

Pearl, 105n6

McInnis, David, 130

Pearsall, Derek, 103

memory, 106–9, 108n12, 110–24, 128–29, 131

Perceval (Chrétien de Troyes), 139

Index perch, 39, 66, 68, 74, 88, 105, 146, 147 fig. 5.1, 158, 172–73

seals, 68–75, 70 fig. 2.2, 71 fig. 2.3

peregrine falcon, 49, 55, 169–76

seeling, 22, 108–16, 124–28, 132

Philomena (Chrétien de Troyes), 123–24

199

Sedgwick, Eve, 134

Phoebus, Gaston, 30, 32

self-mutilation, 106, 108–15, 118–20, 119n18, 124, 130

phoenix, 58n7, 135–37

sexual difference, 51–53

Plato, 35

sexual dimorphism, 52–57, 56 fig. 2.1, 59–60, 63–64, 168

“Pluk of her bellys & let here flee,” 16–19, 22, 177 poetics, 4, 7–8, 13–14, 17–18, 26, 40–41, 50–52, 89, 100, 127; feminist, 23, 54, 132, 168–69; of practice, 13, 80, 89; treatises, 3, 8–9 Poetics (Aristotle), 41 Poetria Nova (Geoffrey of Vinsauf), 8–9, 36, 50 Potkay, Monica Brzezinski, 101 preceptive grammar, 8n26 progressive diminishment, 86–87, 91–92 pronouns, 21, 27–28, 60–61, 76, 100, 144, 150, 150n42, 153 Psaki, Regina, 57

Shakespeare, William, 27n7 Shannon, Laurie, 14 Sharlet, Jocelyn, 43 Shoaf, R., 28 Sicilian School, 36, 40–41, 54 sigillographic imagery, 68–75, 70 fig. 2.2, 71 fig. 2.3 Simpson, James, 103, 107, 128 Sir Beues of Hamtoun, 104 Sir Orfeo, 103–8, 114–32, 129n34 Sir Tristrem, 104 Sixth Crusade, 43 Smith, G. Rex, 42–43

Questiones naturales (Adelard of Barth), 34

Smith, S. L., 157–58

Quintilian, 113

sparrowhawk, 6, 16–17, 59–65, 76, 104, 124, 135, 137, 139–40, 149–50; gender of, 21, 55, 61, 65

reading, 8, 11, 14, 18, 34, 81–82, 84–85, 92–94, 99, 103, 129

Speer, Andreas, 38

reproduction, 51–52

Squire’s Tale (Chaucer), 156n53, 167–74, 176–77

Revard, Carter, 138

Steel, Karl, 14

“Revertere,” 18–19

Sturges, Robert, 92

Robert de Blois, 3, 5–6

subjectivity, 3, 60, 142, 161, 164

Roman des Deduis, Le (The Tale of Deduction) (Buigne), 30 Rose, Christine M., 10 Rust, Martha Dana, 18n67

Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare), 27n7 “Tapina in me ch’amava uno sparvero” (Wretched me, who loved a sparrowhawk), 54, 57–68, 70–71, 75–79, 173–74

saker falcon, 45–46, 49

ṭardiyyah, 42–44

Salisbury, Eve, 129

taste, 111n14

Salter, David, 125

Taylor, Andrew, 81–82, 82n8

Sauer, Michelle, 53

Theodore of Antioch, 41

Scahill, John, 81

tiercel, 6, 53, 55, 123–24

Schulenburg, Jane Tibbetts, 119n18

tiring, 72, 173

Scot, Michael, 41

transubstantiation, 97–98

200

Index

Trevisa, John, 66

Weil, Kari, 56, 168

Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer), 28, 153–66

Wheeler, Bonnie, 174

Trucchi, Francesco, 57–58

Wife of Bath’s Prologue (Chaucer), 3, 17n62

United Arab Emirates, 1 Van den Abeele, Baudouin, 20n73 Van Dyke, Carolyn, 161, 171–72 Vidal, Peire, 60

Willemsen, Carl A., 35 Willis, Katherine, 47 Wimsatt, James, 146n37 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, 81n2, 138n10 Wood, Casey A., 27–28, 42n61

vision, 110–13, 117–18, 127

Yonec (Marie de France), 80–81, 89–102, 105, 174

Waters, Claire, 164

Zeeman, Nicolette, 40

INTERVENTIONS: NEW STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE Ethan Knapp, Series Editor Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture publishes theoretically informed work in medieval literary and cultural studies. We are interested both in studies of medieval culture and in work on the continuing importance of medieval tropes and topics in contemporary intellectual life. Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture Sara Petrosillo Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature Edited by Eva von Contzen and James Simpson Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature Edited by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature Charlie Samuelson Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years’ War Elizaveta Strakhov Material Remains: Reading the Past in Medieval and Early Modern British Literature Edited by Jan-Peer Hartmann and Andrew James Johnston Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England Mary Kate Hurley Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England Marisa Libbon Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland Katherine H. Terrell Medieval Things: Agency, Materiality, and Narratives of Objects in Medieval German Literature and Beyond Bettina Bildhauer Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England David K. Coley Political Appetites: Food in Medieval English Romance Aaron Hostetter Invention and Authorship in Medieval England Robert R. Edwards Challenging Communion: The Eucharist and Middle English Literature Jennifer Garrison Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury Tales Edited by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention Steele Nowlin

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