Launch website on medieval tournaments
On 30 November the website Pas d'Armes was launched. The website, aimed at students and a more general audience, offers a gateway into the world of the pas d’armes (English: passage of arms). This was a highly ritualised form of tournament, that was very popular in Anjou, the Burgundian lands, France, Iberia, and Savoy, even reaching as far as Scotland, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
The website includes a virtual exhibition and a research database which seek to promote a better understanding of the important place of pas d’armes in late medieval society. The website is the result of the work of an international, interdisciplinary Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Research Network entitled The Joust as Performance: Pas d’armes and Late Medieval Chivalry. The principal investigators of the project are Rosalind Brown-Grant (University of Leeds) and Mario Damen (University of Amsterdam).