Stag of Love

The Stag of Love explores the body of erotic metaphor that developed in medieval literature and art from the hunt as influenced by Ovid's flourishing legacies.

Marcelle Thiébaux is the editor and translator of Dhuoda, Handbook for Her Warrior Son: Liber Manualis and The Writings of Medieval Women: An Anthology. She has written about Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins and about Princess Saint Margaret of Hungary.

This book serves as a useful reminder of another of the forgotten languages of medieval literature. At a time when hunting was a principal occupation of the aristocracy, we are not surprised that its terms and figures were used to express other forms of activity, just as today the language of sport, for instance, has come to be used to express a variety of formal and intimate relationships. We are generally aware that medieval writing is pervaded by terms from hawking and hunting, and that hunting episodes play an important part in the chronicles and romances, and sometimes in lyric poetry and moralistic prose. The Stag of Love appears to be the first attempt systematically to bring this material together and arrange it into coherent conceptual patterns.

Hunting supplied medieval writers with a rich fund of words, images, allegorical motifs, and narrative patterns, and it is therefore important that we should be alerted to respond to its influences in imaginative writing. It is the ambition of the present book by Marcelle Thiébaux to provide such access and stimulate such alertness. It is an ambition admirably conceived and splendidly fulfilled.

The Stag of Love is an unusually imaginative, thought-provoking, eminently readable book which all medievalists will surely enjoy.