Courtly Romance tapestries

Raoul Duseigneur’s bedroom was hung with five tapestries. The first depicts a falcon hunt in woodland. A woman is waving to retrieve the falcon swooping down on a duck; a man and a woman are meeting, reaching out to one another across a stream; a woman has retrieved the sparrowhawk, and on the right, the bird is being fed a morsel of its prey. In the second scene, set against the backdrop of a fortified town, a woman playing the harp, reading from the score on the rotulus held by her lover, on which is written “de ce que fol pense,” the first line of a ballad for three voices by Pierre de Molins. In the next tapestry, two couples are conversing in a garden of holly trees. The fourth scene depicts a meeting outside a château, possibly a betrothal. The last tapestry, known as “La Recousue” (The Resewn), is a kind of patchwork of assembled fragments. Two literary sources are manifest: Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) and Le Livre de chasse du roi Modus et de la Reine Ratio (The Book of King Method and Queen Theory). It is one of the rare surviving examples of tapestries woven around 1400, at the height of the International Gothic period.