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This essay looks to the material realm of falconry to articulate how poetic language can possess “weight,” which is, for Roman Jakobson, a constitutive category for detecting “poeticity.” I argue that poetic weight entails a negotiation of control among poet, poem, and reader and resembles weight as it is described in medieval falconry manuals. These manuals exalt control of weight as the primary method for training birds to fly beautifully. The makeup of falconry treatises like Frederick II’s De arte venandi cum avibus, including their marginal illuminations and vernacular and verse forms, shows an increasingly explicit awareness of the overlapping artistic aims of both falconry and poetry. Reading these thirteenth-century falconry manuals as poetics treatises, I show how falconry’s paradox of control and release gives language to an otherwise unexpressed medieval understanding of poetic textual encounter.

This essay examines representations of the womb across late medieval and early modern performance. The N-Town Mary plays and the Elizabethan tragedy Gorboduc are separated by less than a century but are rarely examined in light of one another. Using microhistorical methods and formal textual analysis, the essay zooms in on the trope of the womb across the theological divide separating these plays. It argues that these representations demonstrate a consistent and ambivalent connection between the mind and womb, a connection that does not subordinate one part of the body to another, but instead makes visible a dialectical relationship between the two. Examining literary representations of individual and social experiences of premodern pregnancy, the essay offers a complementary approach to historical archival methods.

Petrosillo traces the literary history of a metaphor comparing a molting falcon to a changeable woman. The chapter focuses on both the familiarity of falconry training among medieval readers and the metaphor’s movement among different genres. Attending to the language of plumage in falconry manuals, Petrosillo traces the metaphor from Chretien de Troyes’s twelfth-century romance Cliges, to the thirteenth-century fabliau Guillaume au faucon, to Guillaume de Machaut’s fourteenth-century allegory Le dit de l’alerion, and finally to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Petrosillo argues that the literary history of the mewed falcon trope troubles essentializing claims about women’s “nature” by using the nonhuman communication of birds’ plumage to figure a feminist resistance.