Masculinity and the Hunt

Distribution, assemblage, capacity: new keywords for masculinity?

“…Marvellous as this treatment of hunting is, hunting is always a 'symbolic activity' with significant anthropological implications; it is less interested in the non-human creatures hunting requires and the complex interspecies relationships constituted through the hunt. 16 Similarly, Patricia Simons, in The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History, considers hybrids of human phalluses and beasts in largely symbolic terms as indications of alienated human will. 17 What might it look like if studies of masculinity took more seriously the recent boom in animal studies?…”

A Sport for Gentle Bloods

“…8 In the case of Gascoigne's "Wofull words of the Hart to the Hunter," both the compassionate sentiments and the list of curatives come from Gascoigne's source, Bouchet's "Complaint du cerf," which likewise extols the medical virtues of deer-horn, deer-fat, and the bezoar-stone-this last again being traced inconsistently to the same two sources in deer-tears and the contents of the deer's stomach. Gascoigne's "Wofull words" expand upon Bouchet's poem by an additional thirty-six lines, 9 but this expansion adds little to the poem's content, being mostly accounted for by otiose translation. (Bouchet's opening ten lines, for instance, become twenty in Gascoigne.)…”

“…The work's subject-matter connects, as Catherine Bates has noted, to the sylvan entertainments Gascoigne composed to honor the queen during her famous 1575 progress-visit to the Earl of Leicester's estate at Kenilworth, works which "sue for favour and offer [the queen] eternal service and obedience in return." 14 And Edward Berry has observed that in the Noble Arte, "the dominance of the Queen herself is overwhelming," for "[i]n no other activity-political, religious, or social-was the Queen's authority so absolute as in the hunt." 15 The role of translator/editor, in fact, seems uniquely appropriate for a courtier seeking patronage.…”