ABSTRACT
In much the same way that romance horses are colored by the equestrian knowledge of medieval writers and readers, the raptors of romance evoke a network of skills and practice that readers familiar with hawking would have shared. Knights who experienced their closest human-animal bonds with the stallions they rode into battle also shared bonds with their hawks. Falcons in literature have often been viewed as merely synecdochic for human nobility, perhaps because many falconry episodes are brief and formulaic. Raptors have been read as both mimetic images that reflect the real popularity of falconry among the medieval elite, and as symbols that “prove” the elite’s superior values and personal qualities. The asymmetry of collaboration and the alignment of women’s mysteries with falcons’ power are overt in romances where a hawk “tames” or enculturates a human male. Though Melior owns the castle, it is the bird who tests and teaches visitors.
