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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture by Sara Petrosillo Leslie S. Jacoby Sara Petrosillo, Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2023), 200 pp., 11 ills. In Hawking Women, Sara Petrosillo presents an ambitious summation and analysis of recent scholarship on medieval falconry and its feminine and literary culture as intertwined motifs, protagonists, narratives, and aesthetics. She broaches this from medieval poetics, premodern feminist theories, animal studies, avian treatises and household conduct books, sigillographic iconography, the mal mariée, and more. Each chapter is entitled with an element of falconry as a measurable metaphoric structural construct; upon these, she connects context of scientific treatises, several canzoni, well-known and lesser-known lais, an Old French dit, and Chaucerian works. These varied works are examined for their control poetics, to parallel the art of training hawks, misogynistic feminine submission, contemporary and modern reading practices, and bygone medieval falconry practicum and its influence over the social status of women, who may have participated in hunting arts and their literary presentation of such. Petrosillo acknowledges her analysis stems largely from an ecofeminist apparatus, which aims to understand feminine intimacy between woman and her avian charge as means to immerse a paradoxical crossing of cultural practices and aesthetic poetic narratives. In “Control,” Petrosillo explores De arte venandi cum avibus, and other [End Page 257] significant avian treatises, to broach falconry practices as contradictory constructs for theorizing textual narratives. Petrosillo redresses previous scholars who have treated the same medieval source materials (falconry practicum) and relays a foundational argument informing her book. The Frederician context of medieval falconry practices function as an artform, one requiring knowledge and active apprenticeship experience. Frederick’s treatise contributes substantially to early ornithological science and aestheticizes falconry ars as one of the seven liberal arts. Frederick credits his courtier-falconer-poet(s) as skilled scientists and translators (Rinaldo d’Aquino, Jacopo Mostacci, Theodore of Antioch, Michael Scot), embracing essential elements from Arabic falconry practices. Petrosillo looks at ars venandi (hunting arts) and ars poetica following the Arabic ṭardiyyah genre and its incorporation of birds in flight as a poetic bravura form. In “Release,” Petrosillo examines gender roles in hawking imagery in poetics and material artifacts as forms of self-identity, self-representation, and self-authority. She uses “Tapina in me” to consider the rise of Sicilian poetry as reflective of medieval modes of representation, as a kind of feminine control over release and recapture. Underscoring the thirteenth-century limited understanding of reversed sexual dimorphism, the naturally larger female faucon over the male tercel, Petrosillo examines the nameless narrator and her lover’s abandonment. Petrosillo channels the sonnet structure as contradictory structure, octave and sestet, to align a kind of falconry conceit, making an argument that birds used in sonnets are females grappling with the desire for freedom but living under the constraint of domestication. Petrosillo counterweights “Tapina” with the male-voiced call-sonnet, “Vis’amoros,” analyzing the context, poetics, and imagery to support this falconry conceit with scientific treatises that provide holding and manning (handling) bird instructions. Petrosillo includes sigillographic imagery of female falconers as evidentiary feminine authority. She questions whether we can understand an interpretational binary of the male-falconer who trains the woman-hawk, pointing to these static images to obfuscate true feminine perspectives and their places in the male-female hierarchy. In “Enclosure,” a thirteenth-century miscellany is used to compare/contrast sequential pieces: an Anglo-Norman verse translation of De avibus tractatus and Marie de France’s Prologue and Yonec. Petrosillo sets up significant co-meanings of the captured hawk in poetic form and context as paradoxical forms that lead to diminishing context. Petrosillo uses the physical placement of these works as reasoning that falconry lends itself specifically to Marie’s poetics. Inherent tensions between author and reader begin with the nameless female protagonist in Yonec, her hermeneutic entrapment in a tower-prison, and her encounters with a hawk-knight named Muldumarec who helps her break free, leading to the birth of a son named Yonec. All reveal deeper aesthetics of the aventures Marie espouses and conceptions of enclosure function in poetry...