venerie

The Old French venerie, whence English venery in its hunting sense, derives from Latin venari, 'to hunt,' which is cognate with or closely related to the name Venus, the goddess of love. Whether the etymological connection between hunting and love is direct or coincidental remains debated among scholars, but the Romans themselves were aware of the parallel: both venatio (hunting) and venereal (pertaining to Venus) share a root that suggests directed pursuit, the following of desire toward a goal. The word entered Middle English in the thirteenth century as a technical term for the entire practice and art of hunting with hounds — a form of the chase that was considered the highest test of horsemanship, knowledge of terrain, and understanding of animal behaviour. Venery was not poaching; it was a discipline.

Medieval venery was governed by an elaborate code of rules, rituals, and specialized vocabulary that distinguished the educated huntsman from the mere killer of animals. The thirteenth-century French treatise La Chasse by Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix, and the fourteenth-century English work The Master of Game (translated and expanded by Edward, Duke of York) codified the entire practice, specifying the correct way to address, unsay, and reward the hounds; the proper calls of the horn at different stages of the hunt; the ritual of the unmaking of the deer after the kill, in which the quarry was carefully butchered and the hounds given their prescribed reward. Every step had a name, and to know those names was to claim membership in the aristocratic culture of venery.

English venery acquired a double life that creates perpetual confusion for the unwary reader. The hunting sense — from Latin venari — and the erotic sense — from Latin Venus — are etymologically related but developed in English as distinct words that happen to be spelled identically. The erotic meaning, referring to sexual indulgence, appears in fifteenth-century texts and was clearly understood as distinct from the hunting sense by educated writers. The collision of meanings was presumably deliberate in some literary contexts — the parallel between amorous pursuit and the chase was a commonplace of courtly literature — but in later centuries the erotic meaning became primary for most English speakers, leaving the hunting sense available primarily to specialists and historians.

The hunting sense of venery survives in a few linguistic fossils beyond the bare word itself. Venison, the meat of deer and certain other game, derives from the same Latin root via Old French venaison, and it has never acquired the erotic ambiguity that sidelined venery itself. The word venator, meaning hunter, appears in English scholarly and heraldic contexts. And the entire field of collective noun coinage for animals — a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, an exaltation of larks — was originally a venery game: The Book of Saint Albans called these 'the terms of venery,' the specialized vocabulary with which a cultured person named groups of creatures. This tradition, largely a literary amusement, is called terms of venery to this day by those who take delight in its inventions.