Picturing the Hunt

I was particularly taken by the visual richness of the Gaston Phoebus manuscript we looked at for our last meeting.  The illustrations are so plentiful and so lavishly colorful that one scarcely needs to read the text of the manuscript to understand that hunting was not merely a practical concern but a primary passion of the manuscript’s commissioner.  A number of aspects of the manuscript’s presentation grabbed me, and I bring them up here not so much to illuminate (no pun intended) as to propose different angles of inquiry from which one could interrogate this document.

It was interesting to me that unlike Frederick II’s treatise on falconry, this text was composed in the vernacular.  The later medieval tendency toward vernacular composition notwithstanding, I found myself wondering whether the animals, vegetation, and terrains depicted in the manuscript were “vernacular” as well—that is, whether they were indicative of Gaston Phoebus’s surroundings in the same way that the manuscript’s use of French points to shifts in contemporary society and discourse.  The mountain crags featured in the illustrations depicting wild stags and mountain goats, though stylized and lacking in sufficient detail to enable the viewer to situate them geographically, would seem to be consistent with the terrain of Gaston’s portion of the southern French Pyrenees region.  Furthermore, the text does not deal with imported or exotic (or mythical, for that matter) animals but rather focuses on species that would have been found in Gaston’s immediate environs. 

Hunting the Wolf

Today’s discussion about the nobility of hunting really sparked an interest within me to look deeper into the reasons behind the numerous wolf hunts t hat occurred within the Middle Ages. We know from the discussion today that there were several purposes attributed to the hunting of animals. In most cases the purpose of the hunt was the chase in itself, culminating within the equally important kill and ceremonial dismemberment. Sometimes animals were hunted for their meat, i.e. the poachers that we read about for today, or the nobles and huntsmen were just trying to keep the populations down within the deer parks and warrens (culling). Most other hunters justified their hunting activities by stating that they were eliminating other predators, especially the wolf, which is typically personified to be evil amongst society within the Middle Ages. This final observation got me thinking, was it really necessary to hunt and kill all those wolves just on the pretense that they were evil and therefore harmful to others?