Hunting in Middle English Literature by Anne Rooney (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ANNE ROONEY. Hunting in Middle English Literature. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993. Pp. 213. $59.00. Anne Rooney has written a short but detailed study of hunting in Middle English texts. Her project is to analyze and categorize Middle English representations of the hunt, which she argues evolved along different lines from those in continental Europe. Beginning with a discussion of the En­ glish hunting manuals and a survey of the relevant literary models--das­ sical, biblical, and European-Rooney goes on to classify and describe the hunting motifs in a variety of Middle English texts. She concludes her book with a chapter each on the two most extensive literary treatments of the hunt in Middle English poetry: The Book ofthe Duchess and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There is no questioning the thoroughness of Rooney's research on the hunt. She brings together in one study a wealth of motifs that have rarely been considered together and manages to correct misconceptions created by previous scholars. Rooney is thus able to add to our knowledge of the distinctive paths taken by this particular facet of English culture. For ex­ ample, she points to the Middle English hunting manuals' focus on termi­ nology as opposed to actual hunting practices and the manuals' excessive concern for categorizing animals and types of hunts, a concern that Rooney says "serves no practical purpose" other than "to divide the elite who know it from those who do not" (p. 18). In several respects, however, this book's methodology is flawed, while its contribution to our understanding is limited by the narrowness of the task Rooney has set for herself. First, there is Rooney's operative assertion that the hunt in Middle English literature developed its own peculiar features. Whereas Rooney makes a case for certain differences, I do not think she establishes a clear linguistic and cultural distinction between England and the continent. For one thing, in this period many "English" writings, that is, texts that were produced in England, were written in a dialect of French. As Rooney herself mentions, the earliest extant "English" hunting manual, the brief treatise by Twiti, exists in both Anglo-Norman and Middle English versions (p. 8). In addition, there is much that English and continental literature shared-not just sources and traditions, but actual stories, such as the legends of Tristan, "the most famous of all hunters in medieval literature" (p. 86). This is not to say that Rooney is incorrect in asserting the differences between continental and English traditions, only that these have to be more carefully laid out and cannot be presented as a 278 REVIEWS simple distinction between English and French. An approach that does for the hunt what Susan Crane does for romance, namely an examination of the emergence of what Crane calls an "'insular' body of works,"1 would have been a sounder way to proceed, I think. There are moments in her book when Rooney gives us a taste of just this kind of contribution. For example, she points to a marked preference for English terminology over French, especially in Edward, Duke of York's early-fifteenth-century treatise, The Master of Game. In addition to this keenness "to preserve the integrity of the native English hunting vocabu­ lary" (p. 13), Edward deviates from his French source in another way: in paying less attention to the practical aspects of hunting technique and more to "the social status of the noble hunter" (p. 12). Given the author's royal blood and his participation in the wars with France, it would have been worthwhile to pursue these aspects of Edward's hunting treatise. Could the preference for English be a part of the movement, attributed by John H. Fisher to the Lancastrian house, of defining English identity through the English language?2 If the English nobility were seeking to separate themselves from the French, why the continued attraction to French courtly forms and practices? Even Edward, while privileging things English in his treatise, takes as his authority a French manual by a French nobleman: Gaston Phoebus's Le Livre de la Chasse. The Master ofGame, in fact...