Rare Book School Lecture: Chivalry in Color: Central European Tournaments and the Matter of Race

Harrison Auditorium of the Albert and Shriley Small Special Collections Library

Wed, Jun 11
5:30pm

This lecture by Williams College associate professor Alexander Bevilacqua considers the peculiarities and challenges of the bibliographic documentation of cross-racial chivalric masquerades.
FULL DESCRIPTION

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Central Europe, princes and nobles donned costumes and masks to impersonate warriors from distant lands. While these men were not at the forefront of overseas expansion, they imagined and experienced the newly expanding world through equestrian performance. If early costumed tournaments focused especially on the rivalry between Christians and Muslims, later ones represented participants from the Americas, Africa, and South Asia, eventually evoking the entire world. A festivity of medieval origin at which the old military elite asserted its martial values, the tournament proved a flexible medium from the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment. Through chivalric performance, princes and nobles not only asserted their claim to rule, they also shaped European ideas about the physiognomy and dress of foreign peoples, recording and illustrating their ephemeral performances in both manuscript and print. This lecture considers the peculiarities and challenges of the bibliographic documentation of cross-racial  Focusing in particular on the use of scrolls, parchment, and color, it asks: what can material bibliography teach us about the intersection of post-medieval chivalry and pre-modern race?

Free and open to the public. Attend in person, or register for the livestream at the “More Info” web link.
Harrison Auditorium of the Albert and Shriley Small Special Collections Library
170 McCormick Rd. , Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA
Add to calendar

SCTK

Welcome.