Difficult as it might be to believe, various forms of Medieval Combat are enjoying a revival; both full-contact jousting and the Battle of the Nations, which reenacts the melee, are increasing in popularity and notice. Here, the Middle Ages represents the possibility of authorized violence and the spectacle of witnessing its combatants injuring one another. In the winter of 2011-2012, jousting made its way to American television in two shows, the National Geographic Channel’s Knights of Mayhem, featuring champion jouster Charlie Andrews and his troupe preparing for the West Coast Jousting Championships, and the History Channel’s much more successful Full Metal Jousting. These contest, and the aforementioned Battle of the Nations, which has gained significant play-time on YouTube, show the Middle Ages interacting the contemporary sport, showing both the pleasures and challenges of taking on an ancient practice in the modern world. These sports’ medievalism is twofold; the fantasy of chivalry competes with a medievalism in which the Middle Ages stands for an authorized force and abandon. This is the same dichotomy found within chivalry itself; knighthood was certainly based on aggressive impulses, and for all the ways it has been fictionalized (both in the Middle Ages and now) as “knights in shining armor,” those knights used powerful weapons in their tournaments, which resulted in plenty of bloody violence. While outside the lists, humility and generosity may be valued, within the structure of the tournament, the most dangerous, the most violent, and the most aggressive behavior is also the most rewarded. What differentiates this aggression from, for example, American Football may be clear from George Will’s famous quotation about the latter sport, “Football combines the two worst things about America: violence, punctuated by committee meetings.” Jousting and melee become popular because they takes away the rules, the committee meetings, leaving only the violence behind. Medieval combat, then, comes to stand, not for its role in medieval culture as a substitute for battle, but for the battle itself, an opportunity to release oneself from all the confines of contemporary life. The key words here are “stands for”; these are not real battles. Despite the horrific injuries, no one is truly risking his life, and despite the military rhetoric, no cause, apart from masculine prowess, is being contested. However, at its heart is a desire to be more than mere performance, to achieve a kind of realness, perhaps a vision of Giorgio Agamben’s bare life, a life lived—if only in the lists—through pure possibility and pure power, unmitigated by contemporary society’s controls. Although it is surrounded by a code of chivalry that confers value on certain kinds of behavioral restraint, at its heart, revived medieval combat provides a masculine fantasy of the past that revels in violence, drawing on medieval elements (armor, fighting) but assembling them together in ways that serve purposes beyond a desire for authenticity. These fighters the past not as a real Middle Ages, but as a reflection of their own desires for this past.
About the presenterAngela Jane Weisl
Angela Jane Weisl is professor of English at Seton Hall University. She is the author of The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture (Palgrave 2003) and Conquering the Reign of Femeny: Gender and Genre in Chaucer’s Romance (D. S. Brewer 1999), and the co-author, with Tison Pugh, of Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (Routledge 2012). She has co-edited several volumes of work on medieval subjects and has published widely in collections on both medieval an medievalism topics.