This chapter considers the pervasive use of coursing dogs as a literary motif in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, discovering recurrent ambiguities already apparent in the ‘cynegetic’ (hunting) treatises by Xenophon (c. 430 BC–c. 355 BC), Grattius (27 BC–14 AD) and Arian (c. 86/89 BC–160 AD) that were known through English translation. Among the texts analysed are Edward of Norwich’s The Master of Game (1406–1413), Sir John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso (1607), Michael Drayton’s The Poly-Olbion (1622), John Gay’s Rural Sports (1713) and William Somerville’s The Chace (1735), together with poems celebrating the Cotswold Games. Close attention is paid to the word ‘sagacity’ as it was applied to the intelligence of dogs. Later works by Mary Russell Mitford and Ann Richards reveal the gendered aspect of coursing conventions, and a concluding section provides examples of the sport as a metaphor for erotic pursuit in Restoration drama and in a selection of nineteenth-century novels.