TOURNAMENTS - Jousts, Chivalry & Pageants in the Middle Ages by Barber, Richard & Juliet Barker

New York, 1989, Weidenfield & Nicholson, first US edition, hard bound in dust jacket, , Fine/Fine cond, 9 x 12, glossy paper, 224 pp, prof. illustrated in B&W and color. The romantic image of the medieval tournament, where knights in armor fought to win the love of ladies fair, has perhaps been the reason that serious historians have tended to regard such tournaments as frivolous. Recent research has caused this attitude to change, however, and this book is the first to present a serious picture of the tournament in all its glory. The subject proves to be a fascinating one, providing an extraordinary range of insights into the medieval mind, and into the origins of many of the attitudes that colour life and behaviour in the western world today.The tournament is the first sport for which detailed rules and regulations survive: from its history emerges the concept of 'fair play', and the word itself survives as a description of many of today's sporting events. There are unexpected parallels with modern sport - the problems of public order, with entire towns on full police alert for tournaments, and the emergence of sporting heroes whose prowess has little practical application. The tournament reflects, as might be expected, the history of warfare; but many aspects of theatre are also first found in the tournament. Indeed, every theatre censor in Europe until the last few decades would have banned the occasion in 1428 when the Spanish king and his knights jousted on Sunday dressed as God and the Twelve Apostles.The details of tournaments yield unexpected and lively vignettes of medieval life: a father's proud record of his son's first tournament, an 80-yearold knight jousting with his grandson, a knight begging for advice on `magic arts', knights practising in the streets of Venice with bells on their trappings to warn bystanders to get out of the way. The visual aspects of the tournament are shown in a series of full-color illustrations which bring the text vividly to life, and which include some of the finest surviving medieval manuscripts.