Dousa’s Medieval Tournaments: Chivalry Enters the Age of Humanism?

Ever since the emergence of medievalism in the early modern period, the tournament – rife as it is with chivalric associations – has been a dominant feature of the Middle Ages in the historical imagination. In modern times, famous tournament episodes, such as the one in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, may well have been an important factor that led to this result.1 Obviously, the key role of the tournament as a typical scene in medieval romance and its strong connections with the concept of courtly love made a major contribution to the fame of the tournament as well.2 Given the well-known disinclination of humanist scholars towards various facets of medieval culture and especially medieval literature, it might be expected that they would express an aversion to tournaments. From this point of view, it is perhaps not surprising that (mock) tournaments feature prominently in early modern parodies of chivalry, such as Pietro Aretino’s Orlandino or Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the organization of tournaments continued well into the early modern period. Jacob Burckhardt described humanist attitudes towards these events as dismissive: