The noble manipulation of nature into hunting parks asserted human dominion over the world and the superiority of the elite to bend even nature to their desires. The creation of the park made it an idealized space that maximized nature for aristocratic use, and thus a visible, physical manifestation of status. The one hundred and thirty-eight folios of the manuscript guide the viewer through the hunt in eighty-seven gilded half page miniatures and the corresponding text. The abstract representation of the landscape in each illumination of Le livre de chasse articulates the imagined ideal hunt described in the manual and sought after in reality. Application of the spatial frameworks put forth by Margaret Goehring and Jean Givens, combined with the theoretical approach by Henri Lefebvre to the social construction of space in his influential work The Production of Space, reveal the style and composition of the illuminations mirror the ways in which the medieval park functioned as a physical place manipulated and altered by humans into their vision of the ideal form of nature, one designed and controlled by m
The noble manipulation of nature into hunting parks asserted human dominion over the world and the superiority of the elite to bend even nature to their desires. The creation of the park made it an idealized space that maximized nature for aristocratic use, and thus a visible, physical manifestation of status. The one hundred and thirty-eight folios of the manuscript guide the viewer through the hunt in eighty-seven gilded half page miniatures and the corresponding text. The abstract representation of the landscape in each illumination of Le livre de chasse articulates the imagined ideal hunt described in the manual and sought after in reality. The style and composition of the illuminations mirror the ways in which the medieval park functioned as a physical place manipulated and altered by humans into their vision of the ideal form of nature, one designed and controlled by mankind.
Fortunately for scholars, the prologue of Le livre de chasse reveals when Gaston began the book: "This present book was begun on the first day of May, the year of grace of the Incarnation of our Lord, which numbered one thousand three hundred and eighty and seven." A famous hunting expert and well-known collector of books, the count completed the manual in 1389. Composed in French rather than Gaston's primary Occitan and Gascon dialect of Béarnese, Le livre de chasse focuses on vénerie (venery), the method of hunting with hounds. In addition to the prologue, it contains an epilogue and four main sections: On Gentle and Wild Beasts, On the Nature and Care of Dogs, On Instructions for Hunting with Dogs, and On Hunting with Traps, Snares, and Crossbow. Thus the count describes how medieval hunters should identify, pursue, capture, and kill animals through the chase à force and via bow and stable methods, such as arrows, traps, snares, pits, etc. The manual also includes instructions for the ceremonial unmaking or dismemberment of the stag and boar, and explains how the integral companions of the hunt à force, the hounds, should be cared for and trained.