Volery and Venery in the French Wars of Religion

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Two at first seemingly unrelated events led me to undertake to write a book on falconry and large game hunting in sixteenth-century France. First, I was given the opportunity to write a book review of Ingrid A. R. De Smet’s monumental translation of Jacques Auguste de Thou’s Hieracosophion (1582–1584), preceded by her detailed and scholarly treatment of significant works on falconry as well as of its practice among the various social institutions in France.¹ Second, I came under the spell of Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk when it appeared in 2014.² The fact that a social phenomenon such as falconry could sustain the interest of not just those engaged in sport but of biologists and devoted scientists from the Middle Ages to the present caused me to examine practices and attitudes towards all forms of hunting in one of the most violent periods of French history.

My recent work on the violence of the French Wars of Religion gave me pause in considering what influence if any the social chaos provoked by the long years of civic unrest had on how people viewed hunting. We know from Montaigne’s essay “De la cruauté” (Les Essais II, 11, 421–35) that he maintained an ambivalent attitude toward hunting. He talks about the unpleasant spectacle of seeing the stag throw itself on our mercy and yet he, as a member of the noblesse de robe, finds himself in the position of hosting France’s princes for hunts.³ If this particular robin felt conflicted on the subject of the violent ← vii | viii → ritual of hunting, then certainly he was not alone among his compatriots, Catholic and Protestant, living through and trying their best to survive the bloody civil strife.

And so a third event led me to begin exploring the topic of venery and volery during the French Wars of Religion. Philippe Desan and Jean Balsamo asked me to write a chapter for a special issue of Montaigne Studies: Montaigne and the Art of Writing.⁴ I am grateful to Philippe Desan, editor of Montaigne Studies, for giving me permission to include portions of that article in greatly extended and revised form in this study. From this initial work, I realized that volery and venery provided a focus with which to view not only the events of the Wars of Religion but also the literature of that period. The hunt permeates the prose and poetry of the early modern period in France. It was a fertile period for the publication of treatises on both volery and venery, and yet there was a growing awareness of the cost and exclusive nature of the hunting ritual, from which the lower social classes were excluded and yet might have to incur unwanted expenses from the damages done by horses, dogs, nobles, trampling their fields.

No scholarly project is accomplished without the support and counsel of colleagues. I would like to thank Bernd Renner of Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center for his insights, in particular on the work of Sebastian Brant. In editing the initial work that I had done on Montaigne and the chase, Philippe Desan of the University of Chicago and Jean Balsamo of the Université de Reims offered their suggestions. I would also like to thank the personnel at the École Nationale Vétérinaire Maison-Alfort for permission to use the illustration from La Vénerie de Du Fouilloux and the Bibliothèque nationale de France for permission to include the illustration from Brant’s La Nef des folz du monde. Finally, it has been a pleasure to work with the editorial team at Peter Lang:

John Losse has been patient and intuitive in guiding me through unresolved computer issues with patience and understanding. Such help and kindness has been critical throughout my career.

Notes

1. De Smet, Ingrid A.R, La Fauconnerie à la renaissance. Le Hieracosophion (1582–1584) de Jacques Auguste de Thou. Bibliotheca Cynegetica 7 (Geneva: Droz, 2013). See also Deborah N. Losse, Review of Jacques-Auguste de Thou, La Fauconnerie à la renaissance: ← viii | ix → Le Hieracosophion (1582–1584) de Jacques Auguste de Thou, ed. Ingrid A. R. De Smet, Renaissance Quarterly 67, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 1011–13.

2. Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (New York: Grove Press, 2014). A naturalist and philosopher of science and affiliated research scholar at Cambridge University, Macdonald spent a year training a goshawk as a way of coming to terms with her father’s recent death. As a child her father had taken her hawking, and she developed a love of falconry.

3. Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). See “De la cruauté,” II, 11, 432–33.

4. Deborah N. Losse, “Writing about the Chase: Chasing Writing in Montaigne’s Essais,” Montaigne Studies 27, no. 1–2 (2015): 59–71. Chapter 6 of the present study is a much extended version of this article. ← ix | x →

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INTRODUCTION

In her best-selling memoir H is for Hawk, when describing the painstaking time she spent training a goshawk in grieving for her father, Helen Macdonald speaks of the pull towards falconry she felt as a child. She was drawn by the terms of falconry, terms that in the Middle Ages and early modern period “attested to your place in society.” For the child Helen Macdonald, they were “magic terms, arcane and lost. I wanted to master this world that no one knew, to be an expert in its perfect, secret language.”¹

In the Middle Ages and later, this language meant different things to different people. To the falconers it was an initiation into a society that flourished only when raptor and falconer performed a ritual discipline based on trust, affection, and precision.² Baudouin Van Den Abeele quotes the most noted of Medieval writers on falconry, Frederic II of Hohenstaufen, as stating that it is not by strength but by the impact of the human mind/spirit that falcons let themselves be captured and trained.³ For the best falconers, the vocation provided a path for advancement at court. For the poet, it was a language that carried nuance, image, and sentiment that paralleled the language of love. As the present study will show in the chapter on Ronsard, not all poets were sufficiently versed in falconry to convincingly contextualize the arcane terminology. ← 1 | 2 →

Robin S. Oggins points out that falconry was classed as one type of hunting, praised or condemned according to the social and religious perspective of the viewer.⁴ Falconry and hawking refer to two distinct forms of volery. Richard Grassby reminds us that falcons take advantage of their long wings to attack from the air at high speed.⁵ Hounds may flush birds from hiding with the falcons attacking them from above, or they take advantage of their speed to attack “heron, crane, larks” (Grassby, 37). Hawks or accipiters have shorter wings, are “thrown directly at ground quarry from the fist, and can take both fur (hares and rabbits) and feather (pheasants and partridges)” (Grassby, 37–38).