10
been the subject of much study.
26
It should also be noted that Noel Fallows’ superb
recent
monograph on the tournament in medieval and Renaissance Iberia in fact drew heavily upon
German forms of the tournament within its research, despite the fact that this was not the
focus of his work.
27
The same avoidance of the topic of Maximilian’s tournaments has also
occurred in the chronological scope of several studies. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, for example,
has produced a wide-ranging study of German tournaments in the early modern era, yet her
period of investigation (1560-1730) begins after Maximilian’s reign,
thus cutting out his
substantial contribution.
28
The area where the study of tournaments and of Maximilian intersect is relatively small,
both in quantity and in the extent of the outputs, which have been largely limited to articles
and chapters. No stand-alone monograph on the subject has been produced, thus the focus
has tended
to be narrow, focusing on one area of the tournament alone. Dirk H. Breiding and
others have investigated admirably the arms and armour of Maximilian’s tournaments.
29
26
See, for example,
The Ideology of Burgundy: The Promotion of National Consciousness, 1364-1565, ed.
by D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton and Jan R. Veenstra (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Sébastien Nadot,
Le
Spectacle des joutes: Sport et courtoisie à la fin du Moyen Âge (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013);
and
Staging the Court of Burgundy: Proceedings of the Conference ‘The Splendour of Burgundy’, ed. by Wim
Blockmans and others.
27
Noel Fallows,
Jousting in Medieval and Renaissance Iberia (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010).
28
Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly,
Triumphall Shews: Tournaments and German-speaking Courts in their
European Context 1560-1730 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1992). In a similar vein is Braden Frieder,
Chivalry and the Perfect Prince: Tournaments, Art, and Armor at the Spanish Habsburg Court (Kirksville, MO:
Truman State University Press, 2008).
29
Dirk Breiding, ‘Rennen, Stechen und Turnier zur Zeit Kaiser Maximilians I.’, in
‘“Vor
Halbtausend Jahren…” – Festschrift zur Erinnerung an den Besuch des Kaisers Maximilian I. in St. Wendel’ (St.
Wendel: Stadtmuseum, 2012), pp. 53-84. See also Ortwin Gamber, ‘Der Turnierharnisch zur Zeit
König Maximilians I. und das Thunsche Skizzenbuch’,
Jahrbuch des kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien,
53 (1957), 33-70; Helmut Nickel, with Dirk H. Breiding, ‘A Book of Tournaments and Parades from
Nuremberg’,
Metropolitan Museum Journal, 45 (2010), 125-86;
Pierre Terjanian, ‘The Art of the Armorer
in Late Medieval and Renaissance Augsburg: The Rediscovery of the
Thun Sketchbooks’,
Jahrbuch des
Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien 13/14 (2011/2012), pp. 299-321; Alan Williams, David Edge, Tobias
Capwell, and Stefanie Tschegg, ‘A Technical Note on the Armour and Equipment for Jousting,’
Gladius: Estudios sobre armas antiguas, arte militar y vida cultural en oriente y occidente, 32 (2012), 139-84.
11
Matthias Pfaffenbichler, one of the current foremost authorities on Maximilian’s tournaments,
has focused, among other topics, on their role in Habsburg politics.
30
William H. Jackson has
also looked briefly at German tournaments during Maximilian’s lifetime. Yet, with a focus
primarily on the tourneying societies of the German
bourgeois elite
and not the ruling nobility,
Jackson’s brief studies left many facets still unexplored.
31
The collected volume
Das ritterliche
Turnier im Mittelalter contains some of the most relevant modern scholarship on German
tournaments, yet none of the chapters are devoted solely to the topic of Maximilian’s
tournaments.
32
Other works are only summaries of the essential facts.
33
It must be said that the best and most extensive studies of the tournaments of
Maximilian’s court have actually come in the form of various museum exhibitions and their
accompanying catalogues.
34
Such catalogues and their accompanying essays (many with
contributions from Pfaffenbichler) admirably begin to bring together the literature and arms
and armour in a constructive comparison to create an overall picture of these events. Yet these
30
Matthias Pfaffenbichler, ‘Das Turnier als Instrument der Habsburgischen Politik’, in
Waffen
und Kostümkunde, Zeitschrift für Waffen- und Kleidungsgeschichte 34/1-2 (1992), pp. 13-36.
31
William H. Jackson, ‘The Tournament and Chivalry in German Tournament Books of the
Sixteenth Century and in the Literary Works of Emperor Maximilian I’, in
The Ideals and Practice of
Medieval Knighthood: Papers from the First and Second Strawberry Hill Conferences, ed. by Christopher Harper-
Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986), pp. 49-73, and ‘Tournaments and the German
Chivalric
renovatio: Tournament Discipline and the Myth of Origins’, in
Chivalry in the Renaissance, ed. by
Sydney Anglo (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), pp. 77-91.
32
Das ritterliche Turnier im Mittelalter, ed. by Josef Fleckenstein (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1986).
33
Such as Peter Krenn, ‘Kaiser Maximilian I und das Turnierwesen seiner Zeit’
Mitteilungen des
Steirischen Burgenvereines, 13 (1971), 5-18.
34
Recent examples include
Emperor Maximilian I and the Age of Dürer, ed. by Eva Michel and Maria
Luise Sternath (Munich: Prestel, 2012);
Kaiser Maximilian I: Der letzte Ritter und das höfische Turnier, ed. by
Sabine Haag, Alfried Wieczorek, Matthias Pfaffenbichler, and Hans-Jürgen Buderer (Regensburg:
Schnell & Steiner, 2014);
Maximilian I: Der Aufstieg eines Kaisers, von seiner Geburt bis zur Alleinherrschaft
1459-1493, ed. by Norbert Koppensteiner and others (Wiener Neustadt: Stadtmuseum, 2000);
Ritterturnier: Geschichte einer Festkultur, ed. by Peter Jezler, Peter Niederhäuser, and Elke Jezler (Luzern:
Quaternio, 2014);
Ritterwelten im Spätmittelalter: Höfisch-ritterliche Kultur der Reichen Herzöge von Bayern-
Landshut, ed. by Franz Niehoff (Landshut: Museen der Stadt Landshut, 2009).