Description
Book SynopsisWhile critical discourse about falconry metaphors in premodern literature is dominated by depictions of women as unruly birds in need of taming, women in the Middle Ages claimed the symbol of a hawking woman on their personal seals, trained and flew hawks, and wrote and read poetic texts featuring female falconers. Sara Petrosillo''s
Hawking Women demonstrates how cultural literacy in the art of falconry mapped, for medieval readers, onto poetry and challenged patriarchal control. Examining texts written by, for, or about women,
Hawking Women uncovers literary forms that arise from representations of avian and female bodies. Readings from
Sir Orfeo, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer''s
Troilus and Criseyde, and hawking manuals, among others, show how female characters are paired with their hawks not to assert dominance over the animal but instead to recraft the stand-in of falcon for woman as falcon
with woman. In the avian hierarchy f
