Return to the Courtyard
The first secure references to tokens appear in the twelfth century. Whether or not the heraldic maunche really derives from the custom of wearing ladies' sleeves on shields, the sleeve certainly was one of the earliest kinds of love token. Veils, gloves, and handkerchiefs were also used as tokens in the Middle Ages, and other personal items could serve as tokens as well, so long as they served to bring the lover to mind. In the first Arthurian romance, Erec et Enide (c. 1160, quoted above in French), Chrétien de Troyes described the preparations for a tournament like this:
A month after Pentecost, all the people assembled on the plain below Tenebroc in preparation for the tournament. There were so many scarlet banners, kerchiefs, and sleeves, many blue ones and many white, bestowed as tokens of love.2
Items that we would consider less conventional could serve as tokens. In the thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach includes the following detail:
Over his hauberk [Gahmuret] wore a small white silken shift of the Queen's (the one who was now his wife) as it came from her naked body. They saw no less than eighteen of them pierced by lances and hacked through by swords . . . . She used to slip them on again over her bare skin when her darling returned from jousting.3
Pieces of jewelry were frequently used as tokens. Rings are mentioned often and brooches were also common, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are numerous surviving rings and brooches with amorous mottos, as well as literary references to them. Chaucer's prioress Madame Eglentyne wears
. . . a brooch of gold ful sheene,
On which ther was first write a crowned A,
And after Amor vincit omnia.4
a piece of jewelry expressly prohibited by the Benedictine rule she was supposed to observe, but perfectly in keeping with the gently ironic description of her as a courtly beauty. Chaucer uses a different brooch to more tragic effect in another work; his Troilus learns of Criseyde's infidelity when he discovers a brooch he gave her on the captured garment of Diomede.5
In the fourteenth-century English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, tokens are asked, offered, and refused in the third of the bedroom scenes between Bertilak's lady and Gawain. The lady first requests of him
Now, dere, at þis departyng do me þis ese:
Gif me sumquat of þy gift, þi gloue if hit were,
Þat I may mynne on þe, mon, my mournyng to lassen.6
Gawain declines to give her his glove, suggesting ambiguously both that it is unworthy of her, and that for him to give a married woman a token would be unseemly. She then offers him a token of her own, a rich gold ring set with a bright stone. He refuses to take the ring and at first refuses her next offer, the girdle she wears, on the grounds that he will accept "nauþer golde ne garysoun, er God hym grace send."7 Eventually he does take the girdle only because she tells him it will preserve his life, and he of course is on his way to his meeting with the Green Knight in the second phase of the beheading game.
There is no indication that the earliest tokens were necessarily marked in a way which would identify the giver -- there are no descriptions of initials or personal emblems, for instance -- although the ensigns given by some of the ladies described by Chrétien would probably have borne a design. The girdle which Gawain receives from Bertilak's lady is described as embroidered, but the designs are not discussed. The use of amorous, though non-identifying, inscriptions is commonplace from the fourteenth century onward, especially on amatory jewelry. This lack of identifying emblems is indicative of the mass-production of the less-expensive jewelry, but may also be linked to the emphasis on secrecy in the courtly love tradition. The necessity of secrecy in conducting love affairs is one of the basic tenets of courtly love, and observed to extreme ends in many of the romances. The Chatelaine of Vergi, for example, collapses and dies when she learns that by spying the Duchess has learned of her affair with a certain knight.8
An exception seems to be the glove in Uppsala Cathedral, formerly fastened to the felt hat of Sten Svantesson Sture, who was killed in a sea battle with the Danes in 1565. This knitted silk glove bears the words "Freuchen Sofia" across the palm. Textile scholars previously believed that Sten Svantesson was betrothed to a German girl and that the glove was her token, with "freuchen" being a Low German word for "miss".9 However, recent research by the Danish textile historian Lise Warburg indicate that "freuchen" was the sixteenth-century Swedish word for "princess." King Gustav Vasa of Sweden had a daughter named Sofia, born in 1547, and it's now believed that it was she who was betrothed to Sten Svantesson, and probably knit the glove herself for him to carry into battle.10
Display of tokens was variable and is not always clear today, especially since depictions of tournament scenes rarely show favours. There is a tradition that sleeves were displayed shields à la the heraldic maunche, but they seem more often to have worn on the arm, as in this tournament in the thirteenth-century romance Le Castelain de Couci:
The first champion wore a sleeve [a token of his lady] on his right arm, and when he went to his station, the heralds cried, 'Coucy, Coucy, the brave man, the valiant bachelor, the Castellan of Coucy!'11
Chrétien's ensigns might have been carried on lances or possibly flown outside the knights' arming pavilions. Sometimes tokens were displayed on helms. For example, Jacques de Lalaing, a member of the household of Philip the Good of Burgundy, wore the tokens of the Duchesses of Orléans and Calabria (a wimple and a glove) on his helm at a joust before the King of France in the fifteenth century.12
In the sixteenth century, handkerchief tokens were sometimes tucked into the gentleman's hat band, or could be pinned onto his sleeve. The Sture glove, as noted above, was attached to a hat. Rings of course were worn on the hand, and Andreas Capellanus specifies that they are to be worn on the little finger of the left hand, because the left hand is "kept freer from dishonesty and shameful contacts, and because a man's life and death are said to reside more in his little finger than the others."13 Furthermore, if there is a stone in the ring, it is to be kept hidden on the inside of the hand. In many romances, knights setting out on quests are given rings as tokens rather than textile objects, possibly for the practical reason that a ring is easy to carry and less likely to be damaged or lost.
Tokens worn by knights are almost always mentioned in the context of tournaments or departures on quests; they are not generally included in catalogues of gentlemen's everyday dress before the sixteenth century. Tokens given to ladies seem to have been intended for more daily use or display, and the utility and variety of tokens for ladies is suggested by a list given by Andreas Capellanus:
The Countess of Champagne was also asked what gifts it was proper for ladies to accept from their lovers. To the man who asked this the Countess replied, 'A woman who loves may freely accept from her lover the following: a handkerchief, a fillet for the hair, a wreath of gold or silver, a breastpin, a mirror, a girdle, a purse, a tassel, a comb, sleeves, gloves, a ring, a compact, a picture, a wash basin, little dishes, trays, a flag as a souvenir, and to speak in general terms, a woman may accept from her lover any little gift which may be useful for the care of the person or pleasing to look at or which may call the lover to mind, if it is clear in accepting the gift she is free from all avarice.'14
The tradition of tokens did not change radically in the Renaissance. Handkerchiefs, usually elaborately embroidered with symbolic designs, did emerge as a dominant form of love token, although gloves and sleeves seem to have remained popular. Again, these tokens were given both ways -- a lady might give one to her lover, and a gentleman might give one to his lady. The plot of Shakespeare's Othello, for example, hinges on the handkerchief that Othello gave to Desdemona.
Embroidery designs in the second half of the sixteenth century were often derived from emblem books -- books of woodblock designs with short verses or moral stories attached to illuminate the meaning. While emblem books themselves are not often available in facsimile, some of their designs recur regularly on surviving gloves and handkerchiefs, as well as on garments.15 While the significance of these designs was considered when they were chosen, they tended, as earlier, to be non-identifying.
Some emblem books are now online:
University of Glasgow : Emblems Website
1. Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et
Enide, edited by Mario Roques (Paris, 1990), lines
2081-2087.
2. translated by David Staines, in The
Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes (Bloomington,
Indiana, 1990) 27.
3. translated by A.C. Hatto in Parzival
(New York, 1980), 61.
4. Canterbury Tales, General Prologue
lines 159-162, in The Riverside Chaucer, third edition,
edited by Larry Benson (Boston, 1987), 26.
5. Troilus and Criseyde, Book V, lines
1660-1666, in The Riverside Chaucer, 582.
6. lines 1798-1800, in The Poems of the
Pearl Manuscript, edited by Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978).
7. Ibid, line 1837.
8. The Chatelaine of Vergi, translated
by Alice Kemp-Welch (New York, 1966) 47-52.
9. Richard Rutt, A History of
Handknitting (Loveland, Colorado, 1987), 69.
10. Nancy Bush, "The Symbolism of Gloves."
Piecework 8, no. 3 (May/June 2000), 25.
11. Le Roman du castelain de Couci et de
la dame de Fayel, quoted in J. & F. Gies, Life in a
Medieval Castle (New York, 1974), 182.
12. Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven,
1984), 201.
13. The Art of Courtly Love,
translated by John Jay Parry (New York, 1959), 176.
14. Ibid.
15. Jane Ashelford's chapter "Printing my
thoughts in lawn" in Dress in the Age of Elizabeth I
discusses how Elizabethans adapted emblem book designs for
embroidery, and has several photographs of gloves and clothing
showing these designs. Ianthé d'Averoigne [Kim Brody
Salazar] reproduces the border design of an English linen
handkerchief of c. 1580-1600 as Plate 64-1 of The New
Carolingian Modelbook (Albuquerque, 1995).
Alciato Welcome Page
Wither's Collection of Emblemes
Research Team on Hispanic Emblematic Literature