«Segons lo caçador conexerà que u ha mester lo ocell»: On the anonymous falconry treatise Libre de Caça and the Libro de la caza de las aves by Pero López de Ayala

Abstract

The Libre de caça is one of the most important among the preserved medieval treatises about falconry written in Catalan, and it is so because of its size, the richness of the content and the accuracy of the compiled recipes, as well as the linguistic features of the text itself. It is, however, an anonymous work about which we know little: we have no information about the author, nor about when it was written, nor about its origin. One way of studying the work is by comparing it with other technical treatises, some of which might actually be considered important sources for this work, which is undoubtedly a compilation of all the knowledge on the subject available when it was written.
In this paper we compare it with the Libro de la caza de las aves written in Spanish by Pero López de Ayala. The latter work, which includes the translation of much of a similar book written in Portuguese, features a genuinely peninsular variety of the falconry genre, with characteristics that differ from other European medieval works on the subject. The comparison of the two texts in two specific aspects, the text itself and the illustrations that accompany it, provides important clues about the degree of influence that the López de Ayala text had on its Catalan counterpart.  

Key Words: falconry treatises, sources, texts in Spanish, illustrations