Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture by Sara Petrosillo (review)

Abstract

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Reviewed by:

• Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture by Sara Petrosillo
• Zita Eva Rohr

Petrosillo, Sara, Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture), Columbus, The Ohio State University Press, 2023; hardback; pp. xxii, 216; 11 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$99.00, ISBN 9780814215487.

Sara Petrosillo’s monograph is an interesting and welcome contribution to both the study of the art of falconry and ideas concerning gender and control arising from medieval literary culture as expressed in writings and visual imagery of falconry. However, it is not just these imperatives that Petrosillo has in mind when crafting her argument. What she really aims to bring to light is how the physical training of these most noble of female birds (and falcons are indeed the female of the species, with the smaller male birds known as tercels/tiercels) and its expression in medieval falconry manuals demonstrate how poetic language functions and how these works represent women within the double meaning of liberation and constraint.

It is all too easy to take for granted the blanket assumption that medieval poetics of control emerged from the culture of the training of hawks, and indeed women, into submission, as a surface reading of conduct books and poetics designed for women would appear to suggest. Throughout her careful study, Petrosillo sheds light upon the reality that medieval women were falconers with their own falcons and that they were often represented as female hawks in lyrical poetry, thereby occupying both positions. Added to this, medieval women were the dedicatees of hawking and conduct manuals alike and chose deliberately to represent themselves using hawking iconography in their seals and in their choices and commissioning of decorative art and manuscripts. [End Page 238]

None of this was exceptional in the greater scheme of things and in the context of the times. Historians have long demonstrated via archival sources, such as household accounts and epistolary in particular, how royal and high-ranking medieval and early modern women participated in the sport of hunting to an elite level with, and in competition with, their male peers. Moreover, they hawked (trained and practised), bred hunting dogs, and exchanged puppies, dogs, and bitches with male and female members of their political, diplomatic, familial, marital, and friendship networks, overseeing the breeding and care of valuable bloodstock to the extent of employing their own equerries to take charge of their personal stables. Testifying to this, sources such as Violant de Bar (d. 1431), queen consort of Aragon’s, epistolary point to animal and literary exchanges with the ‘poster-boy’ of late-medieval hunting practice, Gaston III Fébus, Count of Foix. Violant’s great-great-granddaughter, Anne of France (d. 1522) was also a skilled practitioner of hunting in all its forms, alluded to in poems addressed to her such as Jacques de Brézé’s works La Chasse, Les Dits de bon chien Souillard, and Les Lounages de Madame Anne de France. There are many other examples that might be brought into the present discussion, not least in our own times, with the late Queen Elizabeth II a renowned and expert practitioner in the breeding of both dogs and horses, but I digress.

All of this is to say that, while Petrosillo treads the admittedly fraught path of calling out misogyny and the hegemony of premodern patriarchy with some skill, greater attention to context and archival evidence (not just literary sources) might have given the reader a more nuanced understanding of the actual motivations for the apparent misogyny underpinning the texts upon which she has chosen to focus, as well as the gender composition of the patriarchy—the ‘go-to’ source of constraint and female suppression semper ubique, et ab omnibus (at all times, in all places, by everyone). High-ranking premodern women were not passive horizontal conduits or enablers of supposed and/or actual male hegemony. More often than not, patriarchy was about dynastic success and durability, in which such women played a key role and frequently led the charge, assured the financing, and planned tactics and strategies to achieve shared dynastic and political priorities.

That to...