Birth Tray

c. 1380-1400
This birth tray contains imagery of the goddess Diana.
Legion of Honor Museum of San Francisco

Connection to Website Themes

Spousal Power Dyanmics: The figure of the huntress, the goddess Diana, transforms the captured quarry into marriageable men. This representation puts the women’s role at the power center of the courtship ritual. The depictions of Diana include examples of hunting associated with late medieval practices. The falcon in particular represents women’s involvement in a masculine activity. Elite women often found falconry as the form of hunting most readily available to them within the partriarchical context. Hunting dogs, whose breeding occupied the attention of many medieval elites, also appear on the birth tray.

Community Social Norms: Birth trays, frequently given as wedding gifts but also presented to new mothers, symbolize the importance of motherhood for the woman in a marriage. Considered events worthy of gift-giving, the wedding and childbirth, represent the primary benchmarks of an ideal life for women in the Late Middle Ages.

Church and State: The back of the tray depicts an allegorical representation of Justice along with the heraldry of the couple. Perhaps the inclusion of this representation of morality mixed with political power might have intentionally alluded to the role of authorities in people’s life outcomes.

What is Love: The symbolic vocabulary of hunting and capture appears to exclude love-matches from consideration. However, medieval elites would have recognized the trope of a goddess intervening to set hearts aflame with desire and the role of the classica dieties in the stories of people falling in love.