On Valentine’s Day, the world celebrates love by being bombarded with red and pink hearts—heart-shaped candies, heart-shaped cards and more. But why?
“It didn’t mean love before the 13th and 14th centuries,” says Eric Jager, author ofand medieval literature professor at UCLA. When the shape was drawn before that point, it was generally for decorative purposes, he says, citing the enamel at France’s Musée de Cluny as one prominent example. As the idea of romantic love began to take shape during that medieval period, so did the symbolism.
“[People at the time] thought of our hearts as books of memory, a place where God’s commands are written, and [believed] feelings for the beloved were somehow written on your heart,” says Jager. There were stories imagining “female saints whose hearts are said to be cut open after their death, and inside their hearts are inscriptions indicating their love for God or Jesus.”
So it makes sense that the heart shape was linked to actual hearts. Carlos Machado, a cardiologist and, says that familiar shape does somewhat resemble the four chambers of the heart, if it is cut open, or the image of the heart that appears in echocardiograms. But the shape is even closer to the look of a bird or reptile heart — which makes sense, he says, given that the study of anatomy before the 14th century was based on the dissection of animals.
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