The heart symbol is everywhere. On greeting cards, phone screens, jewellery, tattoos. We use it without thinking, assuming it is simply shorthand for love — universal, timeless, obvious.
It is none of those things.
The heart symbol as we know it today does not accurately represent the shape of the muscle that pumps our blood. That small detail — easy to miss — should alert us to how thoroughly we have been cut off from the symbolic world that gave birth to it. For medieval lovers, the heart was something far stranger, far more complex, and far more dangerous than a pink emoji.
Before the Symbol Was Fixed
One of the most beautiful ivory mirror frames from Paris — usually called “The Giving of the Heart” — was carved before this symbol became widespread. The heart depicted is therefore less “heart-shaped” in the modern sense. The kneeling lover offers this body part, cradled in the folds of his cloak, to his beloved. He surrenders to the standing woman who leans slightly forward and reaches out her left hand to receive it, while placing a flower wreath on his head with her right hand.
This gesture of kneeling offering calls to mind the image of the Three Wise Men approaching Christ with gifts, but also a far more important Catholic rite: the transubstantiation — the transformation of bread and wine into the body of Christ during the Mass through the elevation of host and chalice. An elevation of the heart transforms it from matter to spirit, from a body part into an eternal bond. Her body becomes the altar, and here it is the suffering and sacrifice of the lover that is celebrated.
What the Heart Actually Was
In medieval thinking about love, the heart was intimately connected to the eyes: beauty strikes through the eye and reaches the heart. In manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose, the miniature of the lover looking at the rose is often followed by one in which he is struck in the eye by an arrow from the God of Love — after which the God of Love locks the lover’s heart with a key.
But the heart was much more than a pumping apparatus. It was also the source of vitality, of feelings, thoughts and memories. The medieval mind placed desire at the centre of the body — not in the head, as we tend to do today. The daring force in a human being, the workings of the external and internal senses, was thought to reside in the brain; natural force, the workings of nourishment, in the liver; and the most refined part of the blood — called the life force by doctors and philosophers — resided in the heart. This force, the spirit, accompanied the individual soul from the transmission of life from father to child at conception to its ascent to heaven at death, and could leave the body in a state of rapture.
When a lover removes his heart and offers it to his beloved, we are witnessing a medieval equivalent of an out-of-body experience.
The Heart as Object, as Gift, as Weapon
The heart in medieval imagery is above all a thing — a physical object that can be handed over, locked away, damaged, even tortured. Its meanings multiplied and contradicted each other.
A small golden locket from fifteenth-century France carries the inscription de tout mon coeur — “with all my heart.” An enamelled gold brooch in the British Museum from around 1425 is inscribed Je/suis/Vostre/sans/partir — “I am Yours inseparably” — suggesting a heart given as pledge of eternal union. A wooden chest with a heart carved over the lock illustrates how the heart was equated with wealth like jewels and gold stored in a box.
Yet the same symbol carried a shadow. On a wooden chest from Basel, dating from around 1430, a woman is performing a strange task: on first glance she appears to be washing her lover’s heart on a washboard, but she is doing something far crueler — she is grating it. The inscription das herze din lidet pin (“your heart suffers pain”) confirms it. Nothing stands further from the flat abstraction of the modern heart-shaped symbol than this vulnerable piece of flesh being tortured.
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Join Now →Eighteen Hearts Being Destroyed
The most remarkable illustration of the ordeals and torments of the male heart is a German coloured woodcut by Master Caspar von Regensburg from 1479, showing the cruel tortures that the heart of the unfortunate lover undergoes. No fewer than eighteen hearts are torn apart, compressed, sawn in two, put in thumbscrews, pierced, and more by Lady Love. The captions in German refer to the power of women over the hearts of men.
There is no image that better expresses the fantasy of pain and tearing apart — a fantasy invented by men themselves, and enjoyed by them, which served to reverse the real situation: women were not only rulers over the male body, but also over the male heart.
A Heart-Shaped Book of Songs for a Bishop
The heart was associated not only with love but also with memory. In the fifteenth century there existed prayer books in the shape of a heart. But there is also a magnificent heart-shaped songbook — the Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu from Savoy, around 1475 — containing fifteen French and thirty Italian songs by the great composers of that time, including Dufay and Busnois.
The miniature of an interior with a walking couple seems out of place on the rippling heart-shaped page, but this may be because the interior appears to make a hole in the heart — in that heart which we always wish to see whole and inviolable. The owner could contemplate this book as a sacred and secular container, a coffer full of memories, songs and images.
This rare manuscript did not belong to a knight, but to a high-ranking churchman from Savoy, Jean de Montchenu. It was made specially for him shortly before he was consecrated Bishop of Agen in 1477.
The God of Love Steals a Heart in the Night
In the Livre du cuer d’amours espris, written by King René I, Duke of Anjou (1409–1480) in 1457, a dream is described in which one night the God of Love takes the heart from the chest of the poet and hands it to the page “Burning Desire,” who has risen from his small bed beside that of his master. That this is “Burning Desire” is apparent only from his short jacket, on which small flames of passion are depicted, and his well-formed white legs.
In the rest of the poem, the heart — personified as the knight Cuer (Heart) — fights all manner of battles until it comes into the favour of the woman who, in fact, appears nowhere in the entire poem and illustrations. The gifted artist Barthélemy van Eyck seems to have been far more interested in the glances and gestures between the men than in the end of the quest: he has depicted homoerotic rather than heterosexual desire. What happens in the half-shadow of that great curtained bed is the careful handling of the crimson piece of flesh by men’s hands — those of the Self, of Love, and of Desire.
The Symbol That Hides Its Own Origins
The modern heart symbol has become so abstract, so universal, so emptied of content, that we have entirely forgotten what it replaced. The medieval heart was not a graphic shorthand. It was a piece of living flesh, offered and received, locked and grated and torn and pierced. It was equated with memory, with the soul, with the life force itself. It was sometimes identified with the phallus — synonymous with male “courage.” It was, as the Roman de la Rose and a dozen other texts make clear, a tool of negotiation between people who had very little other legal or social power over each other.
What we have reduced to a pink emoji was once a complete cosmology of the self.
Next: how that same language of flowers, magic and desire quietly fed into something far darker — the imagery that helped fuel the witch trials.
Primary sources include the Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, ms. Rothschild 2973), the Livre du cuer d’amours espris (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vind. 2597), the woodcut by Master Caspar von Regensburg (Berlin, Staatliche Museen), and the ivory mirror frame from Paris (London, Victoria and Albert Museum).
