The knight-defender’s pavilion at the Pas de la Fontaine des Pleurs, showing a unicorn, the Lady of the Fountain of Tears (left), the Madonna and Child (top centre) and Charolais Herald. Livre des faits de messire Jacques de Lalaing. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 114, fol. 1113r. Photo: Getty.

New sources on the Pas d'armes now online

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Since we completed our book and sent it out for publication, we have discovered new interesting sources for the pas d'armes. Rosalind Brown-Grant has translated these sources which concern (1) four pas d'armes that took place in 1446-47 in the courtly milieu of Anjou under the aegis of Duke René and (2) two pas d'armes that were held in 1484 in Paris at the court of the newly crowned King Charles VIII. They are freely accessible on the website of Liverpool University Press and should be considered as a supplement to our Casebook:
Supplementary source 1
Supplementary source 2

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Book now available in paperback and in Open Access

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Yes it is real! Our book on the pas d'armes in late medieval Europe has just come off the press! Part I of the volume provides a representative selection of sixteen translated and contextualised sources on the pas d’armes that includes narrative texts, administrative accounts and illuminated images. Part II, which comprises seven new scholarly essays on the pas d’armes, addresses the issue of how this type of tournament evolved through cultural transfer from court to court, offers in-depth analyses of a chronological and geographical range of pas d’armes from the perspective of text-image relations, heraldry, urban-court relations and manuscript commissioning, and focuses on broader themes such as the construction of masculinity and the representation of chivalric and non-chivalric bodies at these events. The volume also provides a map and table of all such tournaments known to have taken place between c. 1420 and c. 1520, some of which have been identified for the first time as pas d’armes, as well as a glossary of arms and armour, clothing and textiles typically featured at this type of event.
You can order the book here: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781835537664
or consult it via Open Access here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.13083358

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Now accessible: our database on Pas d’armes

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For everybody accessible now! In order to make the data used in our book, website and virtual exhibition more accessible to both scholars and the general public, we have created an online database. It contains most of the details of all pas d’armes held between c.1420 and c.1520 (e.g. exact dates and locations, names of entrepreneurs and challengers, composition of teams, type of combat, theatrical scenario, ephemeral architecture, guests and spectators, etc.). The database can be searched by Events, i.e. all pas d’armes as they are normally called in the sources or secondary literature; Participants, i.e. all people involved in the pas d’armes as combatants,  judges, spectators, guests, etc.; Locations, i.e. all towns, villages, castles and other places where the events took place; and Sources, i.e. all archival, manuscript and published sources which we used to create the database.

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