Medieval venery, strictly speaking, concerns the art of hunting as opposed to hawking. Stalking with the bow silently through the woods, a method measuring the hunter against the quarry's superior powers of perception and instinct, had been esteemed in Europe since time immemorial; but hunting conceived as sport usually meant the chasing of quarry with hounds. To hunt par force des chiens (with strength of hounds) was to chase a single beast with a pack of hounds hunting by scent. To course game was to let slip a brace of greyhounds, who hunt by sight, and exhort them upon a single quarry. To hunt with bow and stable was to take up a station at a tryst or stand set up at a tree, and shoot game as it was driven within range. Greyhounds could be stationed at relays and uncoupled against a beast hunted par force, or they could be slipped at game in the drive. French masters also included archaic methods such as trapping and snaring within knowledge of the craft, though as a professional function having nothing to do with the sporting chase.

The venery of Venus was something altogether different from the hunt, or not, depending on one's poetic inclination. As fine a euphemism for coitus as ever there was, venery evoked the bond of love as inextricable from the bondage of passion: the experience of being seized body and soul by a force both autonomous and compelling. So unnatural the analogy is not, for, behind the punning, venari, and venus are reflexes of a common root lying perhaps as deeply imbedded in the soul as in the secret rhizome of language. But if the concurrence of killing-with-animals and eros may be rooted in mystery, or (more likely) in an irrepressible trope with an allure for erotic violence, it has less to do with horse and hound than does the almost equally ancient notion of the hunt being a virtual war on animals. This study examines the relevancy of these tropes and others to hunting in medieval England, to the law and ritual of venery, and to its textualization in treatises and poetry. As such, it is a study also of how craft and violence were textualized in various medieval narrative genres.

Hunting in medieval England has figured as a theme of scholarly criticism, beginning with commentaries on the main treatises of the fourteenth century.