糖心传媒

Sara Petrosillo, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of English at the 糖心传媒. She earned her PhD in Literature from the University of California, Davis and a Bachelor of Arts in English and Italian from Colby College. Her research and teaching inter­ests include medieval and early modern literature, feminist theo­ries, medieval manuscript studies, poetics, and critical animal studies. She has published essays in medieval, early modern, and theory journals and in a book on animals in medieval literature. Her book, Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medi­eval Literary Culture, was published in 2023.

Women in the Middle Ages claimed the symbol of a hawking woman on their personal wax seals, trained and flew hawks, and wrote and read books featuring female falconers. In this talk debuting her book Hawking Women, Petrosillo demonstrates how cultural literacy in the medieval art of falconry challenged patriar­chal control. In the avian hierarchy female hawks have always been the default and the dominant. What happens when women, who occupy a subordinate position in the human hierarchy, spend time with their hawk counterparts? In our current climate of mass discrimination against women, this interspecies medieval model contains lessons about how women resisted in a culture of train­ing and control.