The Ring on the Little Finger (Andreas Capellanus and Medieval Chiromancy)

In a well-known passage from the treatise On Love (De amore) written some time between the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, the still mysterious author known as Andreas Capellanus, or André, le chapelain, considers on which hand and which finger a ring presented by one’s lover should be worn. This article shows that the passage from Andreas Capellanus’s De amore seems to reflect the influence of chiromantic theory. The presence of this allusion to the ‘modern’ science of chiromancy is a further clue to the perceived Aristotelian naturalism, the ‘vanitates’ and ‘insaniae falsae’ which, in the eyes of Étienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, made the content of Andreas Capellanus’s De amore unacceptable and which, it has been claimed, contributed to the Parisian condemnations of 1277.