There are no red hearts on a medieval tapestry that mean nothing. No falcon on a lady’s wrist that is simply decoration. No small dog curled at a knight’s feet that is merely a pet. In the Middle Ages, those who knew how to look could read the entire language of desire, power and longing encoded in the objects and animals that surrounded a courting couple — a language as precise and intentional as any written text.
We have forgotten how to read it. That forgetting is worth reversing.
The Noble Bird and What It Really Meant
The falcon occupied a unique position in medieval aristocratic culture. As a hunting bird trained for the nobility, it carried enormous symbolic weight — and medieval lovers exploited that weight deliberately and extensively.
Andreas Capellanus, the twelfth-century writer on the art of love, drew on falconry imagery directly. Just as even a small falcon could show courage beyond its station — driving large pheasants and partridges into a corner — so could any man develop the nobility required to court a woman of higher social rank. The falcon represented noble aspiration. Those who pursued every woman without discrimination were, by contrast, compared to shameless dogs acting not according to “the true nature of man, which distinguishes us from animals through the differences of reason.”
This symbolism was not casual. It formed part of both the visual and verbal language of love — a deliberate code readable by those educated in its grammar.
Who Holds the Bird Holds the Power
On a beautifully preserved tapestry described in the source text for medieval love art, a couple stands in the traditional locus amoenus — the pleasant garden place — with a small stream running through the middle. All the symbols of love are present: falcon, dog, rabbit, flowers, and at the centre, the heart. But the arrangement is significant. The woman, seated on the ground, carries a magnificent falcon on her left hand — the symbol of her nobility and her hunting role in the relationship. In her other hand she holds a flower, the sign of her virginity and the gift she might give her beloved.
Her suitor, of equal high status, approaches holding a small heart between his fingers like a sweet. The falcon gazes at this small red object. Though the scene appears to show a bird about to peck at a piece of human flesh, symbolically it represents the heart expressing the spiritual rather than the physical dimension of the man — he is offering that intangible part of himself: his love.
The rules of this visual grammar were consistent: when a woman carries the falcon on her hand or arm, it generally means (in the love literature of the time) that she has her lover in her power. When a man holds the falcon, it does not necessarily mean he controls the relationship.
The Codex Manesse and the Hunter Hunted
One of the most striking pages of the Codex Manesse — the great German manuscript of around 1300 preserved in Heidelberg — depicts the poet Konrad von Altstetten with a falcon on his gloved hand, the bird feeding on a morsel of meat he uses as lure. But who is eating from whom, and who truly controls the situation?
The bird represents the woman, who has her arms around her prey and feeds on him with her kisses. In the image she occupies a dominant position — yet, like Konrad’s falcon, she is also the object of his actions. She is likened to the falcon as in the Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg, where Isolde is described with “every limb delicately formed… as if love had given her form to be its own falcon” and her figure is described as “free and upright as a sparrow hawk.” The falcon is a bird of prey, but she must be tamed by the hunter in order to hunt for him. The poet is presented here as both hunter and prey — staging his own consumption by that magnificent bird above him.
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Join Now →The Talbot Chest: Taming and Surrender
The Talbot chest, said to have belonged to the Englishman John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury (1388–1453), offers one of the most direct uses of falconry imagery in medieval love art. On one side, a falconer offers the bird a piece of meat from a pouch at his belt, while a woman watches. On the other side, she has taken the bait — and we see one of the most beautiful kisses of an entwined couple in fourteenth-century art.
A German poem from the twelfth century describes how “women and falcons can easily be tamed; if you lure them in the right way they come to their man.” The gesture with the pouch is what draws the woman’s attention on the left panel, and the image beside it shows how she lies beneath her lover as the “captured” prey — in the same position as Konrad in the Codex Manesse. Here the falcon represents the woman even more directly: she is lured by the man.
The Embroidered Purse and the Return of the Falcon
A velvet embroidered purse from around 1320, worked in gilded silver thread and silk, captures another dimension of this language. On its front, the lover — depicted with enormously long arms like wings and a hood on his shoulders — is compared to the noble bird that has grown accustomed to being blindfolded, that is, to having its eyes covered to bring it calm and relaxation. This falcon-like young man flies back into the arms of his beloved, exactly as in a poem of the time that develops the analogy between a woman and a falconer: “The falconer knows very well how to call him back to the lure, to which the bird now returns to satisfy his desire.”
The unusually direct and powerful position of the woman as subject and main theme — the female falconer to whom the fleeing bird returns — suggests this purse was made for and owned by a woman, woven by one of the most important but unnamed embroiderers of the fourteenth century.
The Hidden Grammar Nobody Taught You
What makes this symbolic language so remarkable is its layered complexity. The meaning could shift depending on the sex of the observer. Richard de Fournival (1201–1260), secretary of Notre-Dame cathedral in Amiens, book collector and surgeon, wrote the Bestiaire d’amour — a Bestiary of Love — in which animals including the lion and the beaver serve as symbols not of Christ (as in other bestiaries) but as themes of his own desire. He uses the wolf, the crow, the weasel and the crocodile to describe his love for women.
But Richard did not have the last word. In a text added in a number of manuscripts after his, a woman gives her answer in the Response to the Bestiary. She rejects all his metaphors and turns the same animals to opposite arguments: “Although the crow seizes the man through his eyes… it does not follow that the crow resembles Love. Say rather that one must compare it with hatred.” She calls men like Richard birds of prey, saying she would do well to be protected against them.
The woman who wrote the Response — clearly educated, clearly sharp — understood exactly what the symbolic vocabulary was being used to accomplish. The animals, the birds, the flowers were not innocent decoration. They were a language, and like all languages, they could be used to argue, to seduce, to resist, and to deceive.
Next: the stranger, darker story of the heart symbol — and why the medieval version looks nothing like the one on your phone.
Sources: Chapter on Symbols of Love from medieval art history, based on primary manuscript sources including the Codex Manesse (Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. pal. Germ. 848), the Talbot chest (London, British Museum), and the embroidered aumonière (Lyon, Musée des Tissus).
