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

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 chivalric masquerades. 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?