PRE - PRINT Please refer to Reinardus website for the final version, available at https://goo.gl/4CPCef Hawks and knights. (De)constructing knightly identity through animals in French chivalric literature (12 th -13 th century) Antonella Sciancalepore This article explores the role of hunting birds in the definition of the knight in twelfth- and thirteenth-century French chivalric literature. After some introductory remarks on the identity-shaping role of hawks in the hunting practices of medieval aristocracy, the article focuses on the multi-faceted identity correlation between knights and hawks across romance and epic poems. The analysis of episodes drawn from various texts provides evidence of three levels of this human/animal relationship: the use of hawks as aristocratic and chivalric badges (Octavian, Enfances Vivien, Guillaume d’Angleterre); the use of hawks as visual doubles of knights (Anseÿs de Metz, Erec et Enide, Lai de Yonec); the representation of the link between knight and hawk as a flow of actions and values going in both directions of the human/animal divide (Jean Renart’s L’Escoufle). Through this analysis, the study demonstrates that chivalric literature established between knights and hawks a multi-layered and two-fold identity shift, which contributed to convey the ambiguities of the knightly ethical model. In her 2014 non-fiction novel H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald provides an account of the months she spent training a goshawk after her father’s death. The protagonist uses this training as a way to cope with her loss, but through it, she also explores various degrees of proximity to the animal, questions the place of wildness in her personal and national identity and negotiates the terms of her own belonging to human society. Halfway through the hawk training, she realises how most falconry treatises reveal the tendency of their authors (frequently aristocratic male falconers) to project onto the hawk social and sexual qualities they wished to possess, and to claim these qualities as their own by identifying with the hawks. However, as the training nears its conclusion, she finds 1 herself in a reversed position: the hawk training has drawn her away from the rest of human society: “I’d turned myself into a hawk – taken all the traits of goshawks in the books and made them my own. (…) In hunting with Mabel, day after day, I had assumed – in my imagination, of course, but that was all it could ever be – her alien perspective, her inhuman understanding of the world.” 2 Although clearly opposed, these two attitudes towards the bird are two closely interlinked experiences, two facets of one shift in identity. In the relationship between falconer and bird, the human can tame the bird while celebrating its wildness, and by doing so he (or she) engages in a negotiation of his (or her) values and his (or her) position towards the boundary separating civilisation and nature. This two-fold identity shift has a long history in the representation of hawking and falconry. If the many vernacular falconry manuals produced from the 13 th century until the Victorian Age imply 1 Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (London: Vintage, 2014), 79. In her book, Macdonald walks through Terence Hanbury White’s The Goshawk (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951), whose autobiographic protagonist undergoes a similar identity shift during the hawk training. 2 Macdonald, H is for Hawk, 211-12. Reinardus, 29, 2017, pp. 120-141 (doi 10.1075/rein.00004.sci)