E-Book Overview
A sport and a military exercise, hunting involved aggressive action with weapons and dogs, and pursuit to the point of combat and killing, for the sake of recreation, food or conquest. "The Stag of Love" explores the body of erotic metaphor that developed from the hunt together with Ovid's flourishing legacies. While representing a range of human experience, the metaphor finds its dominant expression in the literature of love. As Marcelle Thiébaux demonstrates, the hunt's disciplined violence represented sexual desire, along with strategies and arts for getting love, the joys of love, and love's elevating mystique. The genre gave rise to a lavish imagery of footprints and tracking, arrows, nets, dogs and leashes, wounds, dismemberment and blood, that persisted to Shakespeare's day.Thiébaux opens with an account of a medieval chase and its ceremonies. She introduces hunt manuals that defined and gentrified the sport, in stages from the party's departure to the ferocity of the struggle to the animal's death. These stages adapted readily to narrative structures in the love chase, showing pursuit, confrontation with the beloved, and consummation. In English literature Thiébaux considers "Beowulf", Aefric's "Life of St. Eustace", "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", and Chaucer. She discusses "Aucassin and Nicolete", Chrétien de Troyes' "Erec", Gottfried von Strassburg's "Tristan", the "Nibelungenlied", and Wolfram von Eschenbach's works. The study ends with a scrutiny of newly recovered or little-known narratives of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Originally published in 1974 and now issued in paperback for the first time, "The Stag of Love" brings to life a theme of perennial interest to medievalists, and to all readers intrigued by the imaginative treatment of love in the Western world.
E-Book Content
THE STAG OF LOVE The Chase in Medieval Literature
T H E STAG OF LOV E The Chase in Medieval Literature
Marcelle Thiebaux
Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON
Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Andrew J. Mellon Foundation that aided in bringing this book to publication. Copyright © 1974 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1974 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2014
ISBN 978-0-8014-7969-4 (paper : alk. paper) Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-14396 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
Anthony and Giles
Contents Preface I
11
Literature and the Hunt
17
Hunting Practice and Ceremony 21 The Iconography of the Stag 40 The Hunt as a Literary Structure 47 II
The Chase in Medieval Narrative The Sacred Chase: Aelfric's Passion of St. Eustace The Mortal Chase: Siegfried's Death in the Nibelungenlied 66 The Instructive Chase: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 71
III
59 59
The Love Chase Images of the Love Chase from Antiquity 89 Ovid and the Middle Ages 96 Combined Forms of the Love Chase in Medieval 102 Literature The Sacred Chase Transformed: Love and the Other World 1 06 The Mortal Chase Transformed: The Poet's Vision of the Death of the Hart 1 15 The Instructive Chase Transformed: Love as the La