Author: John Cummins is an expert on Renaissance manuscripts and lives in Scotland. He was a professor of Spanish at the Universities of St Andrews and Birmingham. He was the head of the Department of Spanish at the University of Aberdeen until his retirement.

Publisher/Date: Phoenix (2001, first paperback edition)First published in Great Britain.

Format/Condition: NEW, unread, softcover is in fine condition. Measures 6” x 9”, 306 pages including index.

Description: Gentlemen of Medieval and Renaissance Europe had three all-consuming passions: warfare, courtly love, and hunting with hawk or hound. Hunting and hawking run throughout medieval art and literature, providing not only narrative motifs for tapestries, romances, and sagas, but also metaphors for war and combat, for Christianity wrestling with the dark forces of paganism, and for sexual pursuit and conquest.

Ranging over such sources as poems and ballads, letters, court directives, royal accounts, gamekeepers’ handbooks, and psalters, John Cummings recreates and interprets the cosmos of medieval hunting and falconry, unearthing the techniques and superstitions for hunting deer, boar, wolves, otters, birds, and even unicorns.

“Hunting, as we shall see, is a rich source of erotic imagery; the combination of love-making and the chase can vary from a tapestry of hunting scenes in which erotic activity is a by-product to a mural about love in which the hunt is a supporting motif; from a romance or lyric poem in which a falcon or stag plays a minor functional or symbolic role to a long allegory in which the theme of courtly love is worked out in the setting and terminology of the hunting field.”