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Sara Petrosillo, "Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
00:50:42
An interview with Sara Petrosillo
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in History, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Sarah Petrocillo, assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana, to talk about her new book, Hawking Falconry, Gender and Control in Medieval Literary Culture, out this year 2023 with the Ohio State University Press. Hello, Sarah, and welcome to the program.
- [01:32]
C
Hi, Yana. Thank you so much for having me.
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B
It's delightful. How are you? Are you teaching this semester?
- [01:38]
C
Yep, I'm teaching. I have wonderful classes. I'm so excited every day. I can't believe I get to go in and talk about Ovid and the Odyssey. And it's just a great life.
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B
Wonderful. Yeah. That's some great stuff to teach. And it's really nice to be back in person again, right?
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C
Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I have small classes, so we get to do a lot of one on one work. It's a really great university.
- [02:03]
B
No, that's great. That's good. And the small classes. I say I'm glad to be back in person. As I'm sniffling through my cold that I got from the petri dishes, I call students. But that's if that is the worst Thing that can happen. I will take this over virtual anytime. Okay. So our first job is to put this book in your intellectual trajectory. So this book comes from your dissertation? Yeah.
- [02:27]
C
Yes. I started thinking about this book, I mean, before I was in grad school. And I can talk about sort of the specifics of the inspiration, but. Yeah. And then it kind of sat on a shelf for a little while and I thought about the things that I didn't get to do in the dissertation that I really wanted to return to with the book. So I was happy to be able to go back to that and realize this book from the dissertation.
- [02:54]
B
That's so nice, being able to write the book you wanted to, because there's a pathos to the dissertation and it's really constrained. And then there's this point where you realize that if you have to spend, like, literally one more month in graduate school, you cannot be responsible for the consequences. So you just gotta, like, get it done. But I guess, really, also, I wanna know how you came to falconry. Like, how did Hawking Women. How did that come about?
- [03:18]
C
Yeah, so, I mean, I think there are definitely. There are two kind of branches. So if you'll, like, allow me to. I'll kind of talk about each one and how they converged. So I was living in southern Italy. I was living in Brindisi, in the Gilo, the Boot in Italy. And there is a historical character there, Frederick ii. And like, his name is on pubs. He's, you know, in historical reenactment enactments everywhere. I got married at the cathedral where he had a second wedding. Like, he's just a very prominent figure. And then the more research I did about him, the more intrigued I became. So he was someone who founded the Sicilian School of poetry. So they, you know, came up with sonnets. But the thing he was most famous for was falconry. And he wrote this incredible treatise which I know we're going to talk about later. But I was in the state archives in Brindisi, and I came upon some conference proceedings where a scholar who also was a falconer put out there. He said, you know, everything else, the state, the poetry, building new hunting lodges, all of that came after making sure his falcons were taken care of for Frederick. And I just thought, how. How can that be? And is the only way this scholar can say this is because he's also a falconer. So that kind of sat with me back in, you know, 2009. And then I went to graduate school and I still hadn't really figured out what I wanted to do with Frederick ii, but it was always in the back of my mind. And then in graduate school, the thing I knew I wanted to do, and this is the second kind of branch, was look at metaphors that had to do with gender and specifically ways that women's bodies were regulated through metaphor. And so it didn't take too long then before I came up or came upon falconry, references that compared training falcons to training women. And then the side note in that initial quote about the harem, Frederick II's various women and his Hawking treatise, like, all of it kind of converged. And so I was able to bring those two things together. But I think it didn't start out with I'm, you know, out there really seeing the hawks everywhere. It started out, I think, with that character, Frederick ii, that figure, historical figure, and then really wanting to do something with women's bodies and poetry and metaphor. But then I started seeing them everywhere. I mean, I started seeing them all over poetry and even, like, I would go to the airport and see, you know, the hired falconers for pest abatement at the. So then I just started noticing them in real life and in fiction and in the poetry, medieval literature, everywhere.
- [06:14]
B
Yeah, I'm sure there's a term for that. I'm sure of it. Like when all of a sudden you realize the thing exists and it's everywhere. But, yeah, I mean, this is. There's still falconry. Another thing we'll talk about. So I can see. And I can see how this. This is just so cool, you know? So your sources. So the first one is this. This book, right? We're talking about Liber de Arti venon di cum avibus. Yeah, right.
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C
The Art of Hunting with birds.
- [06:43]
B
Yes. So tell me about this.
- [06:45]
C
Oh, so this is so exciting because, I mean, so I got to do this really cool thing in grad school where I took all of my medievalist graduate students and my advisor out Hawking, and we went on a hawk walk at a falconry center in California, and they had a bird named Frederick II of Hofenstaufen. And I thought, oh, that's so funny. And they said, yes. You know, some of us, we still consult Frederick's tome. There are some things he definitely got right back then and then. So his. His treatise is enormous. And I mean, I think the thing that it does that is so impressive, that makes it stand out, apart from all other Hawking treatises, which there were many, because it was such a prevalent activity, is that most of the other treatises, they Talk about what to do when a hawk has something wrong with it, some kind of disease or wound, how to fix the food for the hawk. But it does, it says you really can't learn the training by reading. You have to just go out and find someone to apprentice. Which I think is very true. But Frederick said, you know, what I want to do is elevate what has hitherto really just been a kind of collection of practical knowledge to talking about this as an art. And I want to do that for posterity and to improve the art. So he lays down sort of step by step how to interact with the hawk from the very beginning. And I have read this book many times and I have met real falconers. And I do really think that you need to actually have that experiential part, obviously. But the way he lays it out makes that training so vivid in a way that I don't think any other treatise has been able to capture.
- [08:36]
B
So when you say long, you mean long like.
- [08:41]
C
Yes, yes, I know I can't show the listeners, but I have a couple copies of it and they're, you know, over 100 folios of like very, very tiny writing. And there are a couple different versions. There's a six book version that I got to see at the University of Bologna and then there's a two book version which is in the Vatican, and that's the one with the incredible over 900 illuminations. So he's got everything meticulously detailed there. His son added, made some additions to it. So he goes through the training of different types of falcon, starts off with kind of cataloging the different prey birds that you would find. So even ornithologists look to it as the kind of when ornithology was established, even before they get to the training part.
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B
So I find it interesting too that hunting with a hawk is so different than hunting with birds. Right. Or hunting with dogs or in any other way.
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C
Yeah. And so this was something where, again, I'm not coming at this from. I have so much experience with it in real life. Right. I'm coming at it as well. Like, I know what a dog is. I have a dog in my house. And that dog definitely responds to a pat or a treat or a good boy and is affectionate. And so that is the first thing that I think when you read about falconry references and then read the treatises, that the way to train them just you cannot rely on those same sort of social hierarchy, you know, methods, as with dogs, that they're not companionate. Animals.
- [10:23]
B
Right. Nor. And hounds are a hunt in a pack. They are pack animals as well.
- [10:29]
C
Right, right. And the old world birds did not do that. They're solitary, solitary hunters.
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B
Yeah. And so training a hawk, then it is about getting to know your bird as well. Yeah.
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C
It is all about the weight. And this is confirmed to me even when I go out on the weekends here in Southern Indiana with the Indiana Falconers Association. Troo. I go out with them. I mean, they all will kind of, you know, make jabs at each other about. Your hawk is overweight. Your. You know, you've. He's too fat. That's why he's not responding. So it's really all about the weight and keeping the weight at the perfect level. Too, too thin and the hawk is weak and mean and not responsive. And then too fat and it's sluggish and it will sit in the tree and not do anything. And because it's satisfied, it's got no motive to work for its calories because it's already completely full.
- [11:25]
B
Wow. All right, so the. Frederick ii, his book. Who's reading this?
- [11:34]
C
So, you know, I think he definitely wrote it with an audience in mind, starting, I think, with his circle. So Frederick II is someone who was excommunicated twice by the Pope for, like, not engaging in the Crusades in the way the Pope wanted. And he was really interested in people from the Middle east, but not because he wanted to conquer Jerusalem. He wanted to get their falconry tactics. So, you know, he was going on. Going on Hans Hocking with the Sultan and found out about the use of the hood. So he talks about that and attributes the bringing the hood to Western Europe because of meeting Eastern falconers. So I think he's writing. He's writing for an audience of intellectuals, you know, a lot of the sort of states, people in his court. They were also his falconry buddies. So. And then they also wrote poetry together. So he's writing for them. He's writing for his son. And I think he's writing. I think he really. He says he's writing for posterity, too. So I think he wants to pass on his methods because he said, I've collected decades of these observations and I want people to know about them in the future.
- [12:54]
B
So this is a passion project and on some level, it's probably just a collection of all the things he loves. Right. This hobby is, I'm guessing, really. But then he understands that there is a wide, very wide audience.
- [13:09]
C
Yeah. And it's interesting, you know, because presumably in the time that he's writing this people don't need. It's spelled out like this because they all know it, because so many people do it. So you have to kind of imagine that he's writing down maybe for two reasons. Right. He thinks, well, I've collated all the best methods, so the English, they do it like this. But I have consulted with, you know, these four different areas of the world, and they all do. So I'm going to bring this as the best method together. So he's kind of said, I have been doing this for this long, and I've talked to all I've had access to, to all the different people. So I'm saying this is the best method. But then also because perhaps he does imagine a time when it won't be so prevalent. But that's what makes it so unique, right. Is that he's spelling it out when people are, you know, not. Not necessarily needing it to be spelled out because they'll do it.
- [13:59]
B
So that's fascinating. I love this. So you're. You're reading this, obviously, but this is not the only thing you're reading. Tell our listeners what else you're. You're looking at to do this book.
- [14:10]
C
Yeah, so I think I was looking at the Hawking treatises kind of on their own, and then I wanted to bring in other. Other kinds of treatises. So I was looking at poetry treatises. So Jeffrey Bin Soft's Poetry in Nova, looking at that. And the thing I love about that and Frederick's text together is the poetry Inova. You know, if it's talking about how to write something in a condensed way, it actually writes. It takes long sentences and it condenses them. Right. So it enacts the thing it's trying to teach. And I argue that Frederick does this with some of his passages and his descriptions of training. So when he's talking about the beauty of flight, when you train a bird a certain way that it wouldn't naturally fly, he's using beautiful L sounds in the Latin and just really luxuriating in the language in a way that doesn't seem quite practical, but seems really poetic. And then I looked at conduct manuals for women as well, because I wanted to understand training kind of more broadly, not only applicable to birds, but also. And I looked at manuals for training dogs as well. But, yeah, I was really trying to look at those three different categories. Conduct manuals for women, hunting and hawking treatises, and then poetry treatises, which is.
- [15:43]
B
An interesting combination right on the face of it. Hunting manuals, poetry. I get it now, having read the book, but I don't know that I would have if I were just hearing it. So I think maybe there might be some benefit to demonstrating what you do. If we could talk about. If you're up for this, if we could talk about your third chapter and closure. Okay. Which is reading Marie de France Yonec through the Harley 978 Hawking treatise.
- [16:13]
C
Like.
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B
Very briefly, if you could just explain to our listeners who even is Marie de France and what are her lay.
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C
Yeah, so Marie de France is a wonderful poet writing in the 12th century, and we presume that she's writing in England, and that is why she goes by Marie de France, because.
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B
Right.
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C
If she was in France, then there would be no need to say that. So she's often encountered in medieval survey classes today, and she writes this collection of these beautiful little stories that are a few hundred lines each, and they're called the Lays, and they contain otherworldly elements, but they're like mini romances. So there are courtly figures, usually, you know, at the very highest level, noble men and women. The women have to endure trials and the men go on quests like we would expect from romances. But then there's often some kind of fantastical element as well. And there are a lot of leis that involve animals. And these. These leis were really popular. Harley978 collects all of them together, but they're also copied out in different manuscripts, kind of selected and paired with other other texts and even translated into Middle English, like in another manuscript in the book, in the Auchinleck manuscript. And so. So they're very popular. You know, they could have been performed and also read silently. And they deal very much with gender and power and kind of in a gender hierarchy.
- [17:56]
B
Great. And then a Hawking treatise, which we understand. Okay, so reading them together, how are we to understand. The vision of what hawks represent? Right. How do we understand women and hawks here?
- [18:18]
C
So, I mean, I think the first zooming out a little bit, the first sort of question I was asking in this chapter and really in the book more broadly, is like, we can't see. See this connection, but is there material evidence in the manuscripts that it was, that there was a connection for medieval readers? And this manuscript provides that evidence, I think, because there is right before the Lays and in the same scribal hand as Marie de France's prologue. So, you know, that suggests, I think, that there was not a kind of, oh, we're just going to cut These things out and pair them together. There's an intention there. There is a two folio Hawking treatise, which is the most bizarre Hawking treatise I've encountered because it is a verse, a French verse translation of Adelard of Baths De Avibus Tractatus, which is a longer kind of dialogue with his nephew in conversations with his nephew in Latin. And it's not in verse. So someone had taken it upon themselves to select just a section of the Hawking treatise, The initial capturing of the hawk and kind of enclosing it in the hands and then carrying it down and then building a small enclosure for it, then a slightly larger enclosure. And so there was. And then right before the moment where it suggests what you actually do with the bird once it's grown strong enough to fly, the treatise cuts off and Marie de France's Lays began. So people that have looked at this have just said, those are the really baffling tastes of medieval readers who can guess why, right? And I said, well, maybe I can guess why. Maybe there's something about the kind of poetics of training these birds, the interaction that happens between the handler and the bird, and specifically in this little translation, that strange paradox of enclosing the bird so that it can grow stronger with the human. And what we see happening in Marie's Lays, which are so frequently about women being trapped, women being confined, and then kind of busting out of that confinement. And then for readers specifically, I think women readers of stories like Marie's, and even now, you know, including this treatise, that same feeling of, I'm reading this within a manuscript, but I can kind of take the things I've learned and take that feeling with me and have it do something expansive for me in my person in real life. So that was what finding those two things together really sort of spelled out for me. And then to make it kind of, I think, even more fun, there is a lay in particular that is very interested in not just a hawk, but specifically a falconry bird. So the difference being a hawk, right? That could just be any wild hawk, and there are plenty of those in literature, references to wild hawks chasing their prey. But when a hawk is mentioned as having jesses on its feet, that automatically categorizes it as a falconry bird, meaning that it's been training with a human. If you see it flying on its own and it's not near the human, then it's maybe not responded to that training and has broken away from it. So there is a lay in her collection called Yonek and there is. The lady is enclosed. She's in a terrible marriage. She's getting uglier because she's so sad. And then in through her window, and that doesn't please her husband, of course. In through the window bursts. Bursts this goshawk. And it's got jesses on its feet. And it turns into a beautiful night just like this. From the stories she's been reading, it says, and they become lovers. So of course tragedy ensues when the husband has someone spy and find out and set spikes in the windows to eventually mortally wound the bird. So having that story in the collection alongside this treatise, you know, I think it just, it proves to me, and I would hope to readers of the book, that these are not coincidental, kind of, you know, crazy. Who can tell the taste of the medieval readers? But the falconry was really so much more prevalent for them as a hermeneutic than it would. Would be for us.
- [22:46]
B
Yeah. So this. And there's something. Anytime you find yourself looking at the past and thinking, who can explain this?
- [22:53]
C
Well, you.
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B
You should try. That's. That's a moment to try to understand the past. So how is the falconry or falcons and enclosure and trapped wives? How did these things go together? And so it's our story then. Right. Like, exactly. So, but here's a lot of these falcon retises. We see that falcons and women intersect in other ways. Sometimes women are the falcons, sometimes women care for the falcons.
- [23:20]
C
Right. And I think, okay, so this is where I got so excited to return to the dissertation and do something that I did not feel maybe bold enough to suggest originally. And that was really thinking about. And this is the thing I love about teaching. This came because I got to teach a course on falconry and nature and literature, and we had a discussion. We read Jean Craighead George's Far side of the Mountain trilogy. And one of the books is from the falcon's perspective. And we all kind of came to realize, wow, the female of the species is so in charge. And then from reading this modern novel, I went back and looked at these texts and I thought, well, what would that be like if you're a woman? And you know, every time a falcon or hawk is mentioned in a treatise, the name for the bird is specifically female. Right. Falcon is only the female. And the male is called a Tear Soul because he's a third, you know, third smaller. So he's smaller. And so what would that be like for a human who. A human female who lives and has lived in this society and Continues to live in a society today where man stands in for people. Right? He. Well, we know that that means he or she. We don't need to, you know, add a she pronoun. He is inclusive of all. Right. Like, what would it be like for them to have this intimate relationship with the species where the opposite was true. My issue with how other scholars had used Frederick's treatise, the De Artevenandi Cumabibus on the art of hunting with birds is that they would encounter that female pronoun and then read it as subjugation, read it as degradation. Read it as, oh, here's an example of beating down women. And for Frederick writing it, it was not that way. There was reverence for the strongest of the species, which was the female. And so I just got really frustrated with the only English translation available. And that is another reason I wanted to go back to it. So the thing that I feel like I got to do that was bolder in the book and really revise it was suggest this kind of formal aspect of it, right? Looking at what does it mean that in this species the female is the default. How would that shake up how we're reading all the poetry, all the treatise, allusions to it, not through our kind of anthro phallocentric lens.
- [25:56]
B
So you're proposing that this is liberatory. Might be too much, but maybe not.
- [26:03]
C
It's certainly less, you know, degrading than I think it had been looked at. Like, the example that I love to go to is when you look at Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, right? There is a very long sequence where Petruchio is training Kate like a falcon withholding food from her, keeping her in the dark. And it's looked at like, you know, she just, like a falcon is beaten into submission, you know, literally to. In the play, in the problem, problem play. And I just thought, I don't know if this is right. Like, I don't know if. Did people who practice falconry always think of it this way? And that's why I started to go back and back and back in time. And I'm arguing that by the time we get to Shakespeare, the metaphor, that comparison, it has been kind of altered and manipulated and the misogyny is so much more apparent. But I think in the 12th century and the 13th century and the 14th century, this comparison is not automatically a degradation.
- [27:05]
D
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- [27:36]
E
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- [28:05]
B
Nor dehumanizing, right? Like there's something, right? And let's say, let's talk about what is the role or the relationship between animals and humans in this period? How can. What. How can we say that this is not a dehumanizing situation?
- [28:19]
C
Right. I mean, I think so. You've got people just interacting with animals so much in such a more kind of intimate way than we could fathom. I mean, unless you grow up on a farm, right? And you have all of the farm animals, like, living in your bedroom, too. But even the. Even nobility, right? Like the hawks are in their bedrooms with them. They're in the dining area with them. They're constantly worried about their weight and their behavior. And so hawks may be even more than dogs, whom they don't really have to worry about as much. They're with them all the time. And because so much time is put into training a hawk, there is for sure a reverence towards them. They're extremely valuable in diplomacy. They're used as gifts. So they're treasured really highly among even all the other animals that do more of the work or the service animals.
- [29:22]
B
There's a long. But there's this. The interaction of humans and animals, though, is this long literary inter. Like, long has a long literary tradition. You know, I'm thinking of. I've taught the golden ass a million times. And it's not. The animal isn't always on the bad side of this, right? The. The ass isn't always the ass. Maybe so. And this works in the medieval period as well, Right?
- [29:48]
C
Right. Well. And I think where this becomes really interesting, like with falconry in particular, is that you've got texts where animals are talking and they're really clearly standing in for humans. And usually, like, I'm thinking of Chaucer's Parliament of Fools, all the different birds. And they're trying to decide, you know, who's going to be. Who's going to be worthy enough to, you know, be together with the female eagle, the dominant. Right, the dominant of the species. And these birds are presumably like wild birds. And that's. I think that's pretty frequent. And then the one that really shakes this up is Chaucer's Squire's Tale, where we have she is a wild bird who falls into Canacey's lap and then Canacee takes care of her using the exact same steps and methods as a falconer would if they had found a beautiful peregrine falcon. And she talks and she speaks and she shares her story with Canacee. So this is a slightly. This is a really kind of rich and unusual one because I think that falconers would say there is communication between their hawks and themselves. And it's not verbal, it's often really visual or tactile because they're feeling their weight. But with this particular story that is taken to the kind of literal, verbal, so it doesn't feel like a fablio, you know, or a kind of moral story. It feels like something else is going on there.
- [31:22]
B
There is also this other level, the very much less literary level, where women are falconers and really engaged in this world. Yeah, yeah.
- [31:34]
C
So I love this. And this was kind of, you know, as I started this, I was. I was zooming along, like, really happy to write about this and read about these falconry comparisons and then finding out that women really engaged in it, it just made it like, even more kind of obvious to me that something other than systematic anti feminism was happening. Right. So I love looking at, in the. The 13th century, the number of seals that women chose. So middle class and aristocratic women, and they chose the symbol of a woman with a hawk. And this is the most common symbol that they would choose. And so I just think, why would someone choose if falcons and comparisons between hawks and women are meant to be derogatory, why would they all choose that? Right. I don't think that it was. I don't think that it was unequivocally derogatory. I think it represented for them something that they could do that was active, that was outside the confines of their house. That was maybe some of the only moments of freedom that they felt. Watch. I mean, watching that bird fly off from the glove is a very liberatory feeling. And so the fact that all these women were practicing it, I think we don't know what that's like because we can't go outside and find that that happens en masse today.
- [33:05]
B
Well, and I like to think about how to just. That women are doing this and that women are good at it. Right. There's nothing about, like, femininity, medieval femininity, that suggests you can't be good with a hawk or with a. Yeah.
- [33:21]
C
Robin Oggins, in his Kings and Hawks book, which, you know, he's a historian who has written a really important historical account of falconry and hawking in the Middle Ages, he talks about records in which women are paid for caring for hawks, for raising hawks, for treating diseases in hawks, and for training them. They're paid for their services. So, I mean, I think even just finding that, because, you know, often you might think, okay, well, these aristocrats, they've employed falconers for them, so they're not actually engaging in the training. And I think for a lot of them, that could be true, that they're not doing it 100% of the time. But I still think that we have evidence there, having to be knowledgeable in the art of falconry, in the training, you know, as we get later in the Middle Ages, it's one of the things that the aristocrats try to use to weed out. Well, who's just faking it? Right. But which is funny because the mercantile class is reading the treatises too, and probably spending more time with their hawks than the upper echelons. So. Yeah, very interesting.
- [34:29]
B
Yeah. This idea of I'm thinking about, like, mercantile women or, you know, women, like women who are employed to care for hawks in an. In a household is just amazing. It's just this kind of. What? Yeah.
- [34:46]
C
And I mean, I don't think it's the majority of them, but there certainly are records of them doing it, which if there's a few records, we know that there are so many more that we don't have.
- [34:55]
B
So many more. And if you think about the prevalence of just treating across time and space, including by the guys who were writing history for 150 years before we got a chance to do it. Like the female blindness. Right. If we think about how many things are lost, how many times just treating male as the default, has allowed us to just kind of ignore all this for so long. But then there's. Than hunting, than being outside. Then, like these things, there's all these domains that open up and.
- [35:30]
C
Right. And if traditional hunts with hounds are Considered too bloody, too violent, too dangerous and too unseemly for women to participate in. Well, here's falconry, which is so much more nuanced. And, you know, even there are some parts of it that have to be delicate, you know, certainly still bloody when they're catching their prey and they're feeding the hawks. But it's this one thing that women can do that is very active. And at the same time, Frederick calls it an intellectual exercise, an art.
- [36:03]
B
Right, there's art. So I still don't really fully understand the mechanics of hunting with a falcon. Can you explain this to me?
- [36:12]
C
Sure. Okay. So there are all kinds of, you know, in the treatises, they talk about the particular moment and the kind of hawk one should catch. The ideal hawk is one that has been somewhat raised by its hawk parents. So it's got the basics of flying and even hunting, but right before it's left and completely flown off on its own. So that is a Ramage or a brancher hawk, where it's. It's able to kind of be out of the nest. And so the ideal hawk to capture would be one, like I said, that's not just a baby in the nest, but not a nestling or an eyas, but a brancher. So once that hawk is captured, they would cover it up, usually put it in a sock. And then Frederick recommends a method that is still used in some places in the Middle east today, which is called sealing. And one of my chapters deals with this, which actually puts sutures in the lower eyelid and brings those sutures, brings the strings up over the head and also puts a hood on it. This is to block out any light, and especially the face of humans he talks about in his treatise. Seeing people's face at the moment of capture would associate those faces with that traumatic moment. So he's trying to kind of control their memory by controlling their sight. So that happens. The hawk is taken to a dark mews. The mews is the name for the enclosure for the hawk. There are perches for it to sit on in the mews. And in Frederick's time, the falconer would stay with the hawk in the mews until it was ready to come out. And so they would stay awake with the hawk. And people don't do this anymore. They're a little bit more streamlined. They maybe hand. Hand the bird off, but it would stay in the muse with the hawk, enticing it to come to the glove with small bits of. Of meat. And he would recommend also whistling a tune to associate with the getting of the meat. So when the moment, you know, it takes a lot for the hawk to overcome that distrust of, of humans and actually jump to the glove. But then he would move farther and farther away from the perch and have the hawk jump a little farther, jump, eventually kind of start to fly over to the fist. And then once he would be at that level where that, that, that trust was kind of established, or at least the hawk knew this hand is not going to cause me harm, then he would start to loosen those sutures, introduce more light. Because of course, the most important part of the hawk's body is its amazing eyes. Its ability to see far surpasses our own. So once it was at that kind of level of non fear with the human, he would bring the hawk outside, unhood it and have a long leash on it called a crance, right, which has to do with this word for trust. And it would fly with the creance a little bit farther, a little bit farther, until it was ready to fly without the creon. So and free fly from one, you know, either a perch or one falconer to the other one far away. And at that point, what's established in the hawk's brain and body is, okay, I can expend the least amount of energy flying to this human's glove. So in the wild, right, they have this kind of rule where they will expend the least amount of energy for the most amount of reward. So they'll go after really small prey like lizards or voles or moles, right? And those are the kinds of things that are not, you know, going to be impressive for a falconer. So they'll be training them to catch larger prey, hares or cranes even, and things that they might even not catch in the wild. And the way they do that is by regulating their weight, so keeping their weight at a certain level so that they're strong enough to go pursue that prey, but hungry enough to say, okay, well that gloved person is telling me to do this. And then so I'm going to trust that that's going to work and give me caloric reward. Once the prey, once the falcon or hawk catches the prey, the falconer has to quickly find where that situation is. They'll go over to the hawk, which is hovering over the prey, and then cover up the prey with. Recently I've seen them do it with, you know, a piece of cloth, but they'll cover up the prey, use something else to entice the hawk to jump off, so another piece of meat to jump off sometimes they'll cut out, like the heart or the liver or really rich part that has to go through no work to get because the human has taken it out and reward them with that really like, rich caloric treat. And so they'll jump off and then the human takes the prey away from it. So.
- [41:25]
B
Wow.
- [41:28]
C
But I mean, I think, like, the thing that is so interesting about Frederick's treatise and the way he conceives of falconry as an art is the aesthetics of it. So he says the point is not to catch game, but the point is to have hawks that are trained in a way where they create the most beautiful flight. So for him, the chase, right? Watching the. Watching the hawk fly through the air to go after the prey, more important than if he gets the prey, he doesn't need it. I mean, and that's why it really is an activity for the wealthy, because especially the falcons, which require vast tracts of land because they hunt from the sky. So they're flying up hundreds of feet, they're hunting from on high. You know, they might not even bring home dinner. So that's not the point of it. It is to train them to perform these beautiful aerial feats, right.
- [42:27]
B
Which also, then. Then it makes the. There's this natural connection with poetry, right?
- [42:35]
C
Enter the Poetics. Treatise.
- [42:37]
B
Enter the Poetics. Yeah, this. This really works. And the amount and as well, the. This isn't some distant and distant thing you don't understand. It isn't like as if you were speaking of falcons the way you might speak of dragons or something, right? This is common. And around you. And everyone will see. Falcon will see these birds doing beautiful things, right?
- [43:04]
C
And they see them doing the beautiful things in the air, and they also encounter them walking around. People are trying to habituate them to the noises of the city. And so they're everywhere, you know, on people's fists, walking around with their hoods on. And so they're just a part of everyday life as well, whether they're in the air, on the fist.
- [43:27]
B
Amazing. So cool. Well, and so cool. This is not just theoretical for you. I'm like, wow, this would be neat. You do this? Yeah, yeah.
- [43:37]
C
So like I said, I got to start in California and got to do it with a group of women, which was amazing. There's one incredible falconer, and she's an artist as well. Her name is Maria Lehman. Does the most beautiful representational paintings of all birds and landscapes. And she really taught me. I have a whole section in the conclusion kind of dedicated to her because watching her with her bird, she anticipated its every move, she anticipated what it would need. Just holding it on the fist and I could watch her body kind of shift really subtly to accommodate it. And it was something, you know, was not sure if she even knew she was doing it. And so, so I got to. That was kind of my first awestruck moment where I'm up close and I'm not just seeing them do the touristy thing. You know, like you can go, especially in the UK and stay at a castle and then do that, but really seeing the kind of behind the scenes of the training. And then recently I've been able to, in Evansville, go out hunting with a group of falconers here who have been really welcoming. And I mean, in modernity in the United States, you have to kind of pre apprentice and then apprentice for a few years before you can become a general falconer. So they're, they're really concerned about people doing it because they think it's just, you know, cool and then maltreating the birds. So there is a system set up, an apprentice system to make sure that the birds are treated well. So, yeah, I've got to go and see it happen. And the thing that I think doing it in real life, like so frequently recently compared to just reading about it, that I was able to see, really understand a lot better, is the different hunting styles. Hunting with a red tailed hawk versus a goshawk, for example, or hunting with a falcon, which, like I said, flies up in the air. So each of them kind of waits in a different place for you to flush out the prey. The goshawk waits on the fist of the falconer. So we as a group have to try and flush out the prey really tight together. Whereas the red hawk, red tailed hawk is up in a tree and we're kind of spread out. And I am just, I'm so impressed and baffled, even though I've read about this for so many years, that it's way over there in a tree, we're, you know, several hundred feet away and out goes a rabbit in another direction and it's still able to see it and get it.
- [46:09]
B
Wow, that's amazing. That, that's incredibly impressive. Yeah, I can see why you can do this. All right, Sarah, I've taken tons of your time and I'm fascinated and I think at some point I stopped being a reasonable interviewer and I'm just like, oh, you're so cool. So it's time to move, move on. So I only have just this one more question for you. And I can't imagine what the answer is, but what are you gonna do next? What follows this? What is. What's after this project?
- [46:37]
C
Okay, so I started off by saying, yes, the falconry. I was really interested in it because of Frederick ii. But the thing, you know, that pushed me to. To be in grad school and to want to teach literature and poetry to students was metaphor and metonymy and poetic form and women. So I mentioned that the very popular seal in the early or the high Middle ages was a woman with a hawk. Well, right before that it was the Virgin Mary. So I am really interested in metaphors for the womb. And you know, I think in the, in the book there is like a very cogent connection to me, and that is the way that even the word falcon, which we haven't really talked about, but in, in French and then passed on into Middle English, falcon was a euphemism for female genitalia. Right. Which had a great deal to do with how it stood in for control or presumed control. Right. And so I'm really interested in metaphors that elide the actual literal connection between a woman and her body. So looking at how, since Plato, men have used the womb as a metaphor for the male mind. In a book that I love and adore but was not able to put in this book, T.H. white's the Goshawk, he talks about an invisible cord, like an umbilical cord, between the falconer's mind and the hawk. He talks about male travail like a woman going through labor. And so I'm really fascinated, starting, I think, with, like I said, Plato, but especially in the Middle Ages, how the uterus is represented and women's connection to their bodies. So I really want to write a book about this kind of tracking that metaphor and tracking how we talk about the uterus. And as you know, I love the praxis part of it. So I've actually been able to, as a non clinical observer, observe some surgeries and see the uterus, see inside of it, see it come out. So I want to hear about how surgeons talk about, talk about the womb, talk about the uterus. And so I've been able to kind of go and do that for real as well as looking in the literature. So it seems like totally disparate. It has nothing to do with it, but it's all there. It's all connected through metaphor.
- [49:17]
B
I see it. I absolutely see it. That's fascinating. That'll be a really fun project. I'm looking forward to reading the results of this work as well.
- [49:26]
C
Thank you so much, Yana.
- [49:28]
B
All right, Sarah, thanks so much, listeners. Please go to our website, follow the links, and definitely spend a little bit of time with Hawking Women, Falconry, Gender and Control in Medieval Literary culture this year, 2023 with Ohio State University Press. Sarah, thanks very much. Take care.
- [49:47]
C
Thank you. Yana, You.