This book examines for the first time the tradition of hunting imagery and allusion in specifically Middle English literature, and discovers that it differs from the parallel European tradition in its use of certain images. Anne Rooney begins with a review of the Middle English hunting manuals, the texts that taught the art of hunting principally through instruction in the terminology, horn calls and attendant ceremony of the hunt. The second chapter sets the Middle English tradition in its European context, with an account of the inheritance from Classical and medieval French literature. The central part of the book identifies and categorises hunting images in verse and prose romance, other narrative verse, lyric poetry and religious writings of many types. The final two chapters reassess hunting images in two important Middle English texts, The Book of the Duchess and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Dr ANNE ROONEY teaches medieval English literatureat the University of Cambridge.