Stag of Love: The Chase in Medieval Literature - Hardcover

"This book serves as a useful reminder of another of the forgotten languages of medieval literature. At a time when hunting was a principal occupation of the aristocracy, we are not surprised that its terms and figures were used to express other forms of activity, just as today the language of sport, for instance, has come to be used to express a variety of formal and intimate relationships. We are generally aware that medieval writing is pervaded by terms from hawking and hunting, and that hunting episodes play an important part in the chronicles and romances, and sometimes in lyric poetry and moralistic prose. The Stag of Love appears to be the first attempt systematically to bring this material together and arrange it into coherent conceptual patterns." * Speculum * "Hunting supplied medieval writers with a rich fund of words, images, allegorical motifs, and narrative patterns, and it is therefore important that we should be alerted to respond to its influences in imaginative writing. It is the ambition of the present book by Marcelle Thiebaux to provide such access and stimulate such alertness. It is an ambition admirably conceived and splendidly fulfilled." * Review of English Studies * "The Stag of Love is an unusually imaginative, thought-provoking, eminently readable book which all medievalists will surely enjoy." * Modern Language Review *

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 Thiebaux 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.Thiebaux 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 Thiebaux considers Beowulf, Aefric's Life of St. Eustace, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Chaucer. She discusses Aucassin and Nicolete, Chretien 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.