The tournament was one of the great social phenomena of medieval civilization. It became such a standard chivalric event that it was assimilated as a widespread theme into literature. The purpose of this study is to discuss the representation of the tournament as it appears in a select corpus of medieval French texts from 1150 to 1226. The choice of works allows for a comparison of the representation of the tournament in both fictional and biographical verse narratives, from which salient conclusions can be drawn, such as to what extent, if any, genre influenced the way in which the tournament was treated. The work that provides the largest number of tournaments for study is the anonymous Histoire de Guillaume le Marechal. Among the remaining works are romances by Chretien de Troyes and Hue de Rotelande, and lais by Marie de France Existing scholarly contributions concerning the sport concentrate on its technical and regulatory aspects, whereas this study focuses on a limited set of elements that make up its literary re-creation. The study opens with brief background information on the tournament and its supposed origins, plus a short discussion of the bans against it. The remaining chapters treat the preparations and opening and closing practices; the waiting period, the announcement, and heraldry; the participants; the involvement of women; the location and duration; the gains, prizes, and victors; the casualties; and the weapons and techniques. This research further proposes to clarify the problematic nature of the early term for the sport (e.g., tornoi versus ahatine, an apparent synonym), and investigates the function of the tournament in the works This dissertation ultimately shows that fictional representations of the tournament are sometimes more realistic than 'historical' ones, that there is a certain rhetoric applicable to the depiction of the tournament regardless of the genre in which the medieval author chose to work, and, that the question of genre cannot be separated from that of the intended audience The study includes six pages of charts, schematically illustrating eight of the outlined elements with their corresponding works and line numbers / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_24023 |
| Date | January 1992 |
| Contributors | Santina, Mary Arlene (Author), Poe, Elizabeth W (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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