Figures, such as these examples, are within the medieval scholastic world and are ways to internalize extensive texts and understand complicated ideas. It goes without saying that there may be other, more effective, ways to turn Liechtenauer’s verse into a tree but these have already been quite useful to my understanding and interpretation of the art.

Yet another way to explore complex ideas would be to play with it in the realm of the allegory. If we were to suggest that medieval knights had three main leisure pursuits, they would likely be hunting, fighting, and romancing. While there are a variety of ways that these pursuits are interconnected, I suspect that, to-date, they haven’t all been fully explored.

Hunting as an allegory for love is a common medieval theme and was quite popular across Europe in general as well as, more relevant to our interests, in 14th and 15th century German-speaking lands. The Minnesanger and the meaning of their poetry has been extensively explored in literature to date and is a rich source of material for German hunting traditions. Additionally, much like our familiar fighting treatises, there still exist numerous treatises on hunting, including such diverse techniques as judging and harboring a stag, hunting with and training falcons, trapping, fowling, and zoological treatises. Despite a wide understanding that hunting was a training ground for war, and an allegory for romantic and carnal love, the symbolic connection between the techniques of the hunt and the tactics of Liechtenauer’s Ritterkunst have been much less understood and explored.

One example from the verse is from the beginning of the Gemeine Lere, where it opens “wildu kunst schauen / sich linck gen und recht mit hawen”, “If you want to behold the art, see that you go on the left and strike with the right.” (translation by Christian Tobler). The text of the gloss goes on to explain that this means that one should first learn how to strike correctly if you wish to be strong, and further that you should step with the right foot after you strike from your right side if you wish for your blows to be long and straight. Should we look to information on hunting with a hawk (a ‘weapon’ that flies long and straight), the medieval text called the Avarium goes into detail about hawks and says that one should carry the hawk on the left but loose it from the right. “Oddly, the Avarium explains this with reference to the Song of Songs 8:3: ‘Leva eius sub capite meo, Et dextera illius amplexabitur me’ [His left hand should be under my head, and his right hand should embrace me]. Hugo [the author of Avarium] says that the left signifies temporal good whereas the right is true eternal good” (from the Tale of the Alerion by Minnette Gaudet and Constance B. Hieatt, page 19).

I deliberately chose this example to introduce the idea of connection in a very theoretical way. This provides us no more information about how to strike properly or what is a “good cut” than we had without it. What it does provide, however, is a wonderful example of how very layered the medieval mind might be — that carrying on the left and striking from the right is “proper” with both sword and hawk, and that the bible is ultimately used by the medieval scholar as the reasoning for why this might be so — a very different conclusion than what we might come to when reading the same text!