Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Myhill, Nova

Keywords

Early Modern England, Tournament, Social Ritual, Monarchy

Area of Concentration

English

Abstract

Knightly tournament was a vital tradition in both the history and literature of the European Medieval Era. My thesis examines the tournament in England in the transitional period of the fifteenth and sixteenth century as a tool for image-making and focuses on the relationship between monarchy and aristocracy; both the historical and literary depictions of tournament are covered. In the first chapter, I look at the publisher William Caxton and his cultivation of a chivalric readership in England as well as the literary manifestations of tournament in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. The second chapter covers Queen Elizabeth’s use of the Accession Day tilts as a form of propaganda, as well as romance notions of tournament in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Philip Sidney’s Lady of May and his sonnets. Although written with different intentions and in different genres, I argue that all of these texts exhibit a concern with similar themes in the tournament tradition: issues with public versus private in the tournament space, the role of the monarch, and the ultimate failure of chivalric ideals in the face of human imperfections.

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