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.

PIs

Rosalind Brown-Grant (PI)

Rosalind Brown-Grant (PI) is Emerita Professor of Late Medieval French Literature at the University of Leeds. She has a BA in Modern Languages (French and Italian) as well as a PhD from the University of Manchester. She has published numerous books and articles on Christine de Pizan’s works in defence of women, late medieval romance, late medieval historiographical texts and text-image relations in medieval manuscripts, and has also edited and translated several medieval French texts.

University website
Academia.edu

Mario Damen (PI)

Mario Damen (PI) is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam. He studied History at the University of Leiden and in Santiago de Compostela and subsequently gained his PhD at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with the award of distinction of cum laude. He has published widely on the cultural and socio-political history of the late medieval Low Countries in general, and on the nobility and tournaments in particular.

University website
Academia.edu
Twitter/X

Assistant

Jacob H. Deacon

Jacob H. Deacon is the administrative assistant for the Pas d’armes and Late Medieval Chivalry network. Outside of the network, Jacob is completing his PhD at the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on fencing knowledge, practice, and culture in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England, and he is supervised by Drs Alan Murray and Karen Watts. Jacob holds BA and MA degrees in History from Cardiff University (2015 and 2016), where he was awarded the undergraduate Graham and Ismay Thomas Prize for best final year student in Medieval History. He is also an editor for the open access historical European martial arts journal, Acta Periodica Duellatorum.

University website  
Twitter/X

Project members

Nils Bock

Nils Bock is Lecturer at the University of Münster. He studied History and Archaeology at the University of Trier and in Toulouse and subsequently gained his PhD at the University of Münster. He has published on the history of heralds, the history of late medieval Burgundy, and on medieval financial history.

University website
Academia.edu

Catherine Blunk

Catherine Blunk is an Associate Professor of French at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. She has a BA in French and International Studies as well as a Masters and PhD in French from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where she wrote her dissertation on the poetics of the tournament in late medieval chronicle and romance. She continues to research tournaments and has published on the pas d’armes.

University website

Thalia Brero

Thalia Brero is Assistant Professor at the University of Neuchâtel, where she teaches History of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. She studied at the University of Lausanne, was a visiting scholar at Université Paris-Est Créteil and at Ghent University, as well as a research and teaching fellow at the University of Geneva. She works on ceremonies and rituals in late medieval courts (especially Savoy), on dynastic strategies, princely meetings and on Renaissance printed news reports.

University website
Academia.edu

Anne D. Hedeman

Anne D. Hedeman is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Kansas. She has published extensively on the relationships between text and image in vernacular late medieval French manuscripts. Her research pays particular attention to the means by which illustrations of historical, classical, or contemporary texts originating in non-French cultures employ illumination to communicate effectively with late medieval French readers.

University website
Academia.edu

Ralph Moffat

Ralph Moffat is Curator of European Arms and Armour at Glasgow Museums. He has an MA (Hons) in Scottish Historical Studies and an MSc in Medieval Studies from the University of Edinburgh. His doctorate from the University of Leeds involved a study of an original fifteenth-century manuscript on tournaments in the Royal Armouries Library. He has published several articles and a book on arms and armour with a particular focus on the Middle Ages.
Museum Website

Alan V. Murray MA PhD FRHistS

Alan V. Murray is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Studies and Editorial Director of the International Medieval Bibliography (University of Leeds). He studied History, German Language and Literature and Folk Studies at the Universities of St Andrews, Salzburg and Freiburg. He has published extensively on the crusades, warfare and chivalry. His work on tournaments includes several essays on tourneys and jousting in the German-speaking countries, with a particular focus on the Styrian nobleman Ulrich von Liechtenstein.

University website

Christina Normore

Christina Normore is Associate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. She received her BA in Art History and Religion from Oberlin College, and her doctorate in Art History from the University of Chicago. She has published on the aesthetic and social priorities of late medieval court banquets in northwestern Europe, particularly the Valois Burgundian court, and is currently focusing on the role of the arts in promoting and questioning militarism during the Hundred Years War and on the implications of the current ‘global turn’ in Medieval Studies.  

University website
Academia.edu

Klaus Oschema

Klaus Oschema is Director of the Institut Historique Allemand in Paris and Professor of Late Medieval History at the Ruhr-University Bochum. Having studied History, Philosophy and English at the Universities of Bamberg and Paris X-Nanterre, he was awarded his PhD by the Technical University Dresden and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris). He has taught at Berne (Switzerland), Heidelberg and Frankfurt. His research focuses on late medieval nobility and courtly society (Burgundy, Savoy), astrology in the late Middle Ages, and conceptions of geographical and cultural world order in the Middle Ages.

University website
Academia.edu
Twitter/X

Justin M. Sturgeon

Justin M. Sturgeon is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Western Florida. His research centres on illuminated medieval manuscripts and understanding the interaction between text, image and material culture in order to address questions about chivalric identity and status. His thesis and recent monograph examine these issues within the context of René of Anjou’s Livre des tournois, a fifteenth-century treatise that describes and visualises the author’s idealised form of a late medieval tournament.
[url=https://uwf.edu/cassh/departments/art-and-design/faculty/justin-m-sturgeon-.html]University website
Academia.edu

Michelle Szkilnik

Michelle Szkilnik is Emerita Professor of French Medieval Literature at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris)and she has a doctorate from this institution. A specialist of narrative literature, she has published numerous articles and books about medieval French romances from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. She has also edited and translated several medieval French texts.
University website

Craig Taylor

Craig Taylor is Professor of Medieval History at the University of York, and a Fellow of both the Société de l'Histoire de France and the Royal Historical Society. Craig is an intellectual and cultural historian who studies the politics and aristocracies of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France and England. His research focuses upon recovering the voices of the medieval past as expressed through life-writings and other genres.

University website
Academia.edu

Marina Viallon

Marina Viallon is an art historian specialising in arms and armour, equestrian equipment and knightly court festivals. She studied art history at the École du Louvre in Paris, before getting a Master’s in Museum Studies and an MA in Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds; her PhD at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris was on French Renaissance courtly tournaments. She has worked at the Musée de l’Armée in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and has published numerous articles in books and exhibition catalogues on her fields of expertise.

Academia.edu
Twitter/X

Karen Watts

Karen Watts is Visiting Research and Teaching Fellow at the Postgraduate Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds, as well as Professeur de Patrimoine et Archéologie Militaires at the École du Louvre, Paris, and Curator Emeritus, Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds. She is the curator for 'Treasures of Gold and Silver Wire', a major exhibition held at the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, in 2023.