Predatory Poetics: Reading Weight in Thirteenth-Century Falconry Treatises

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.