The death of chivalry has been vastly overstated. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, European princes and nobles staged mock battles in the guise of foreigners, impersonating Turks, Africans, South Asians, and Americans through armor, costume, weapons, masks, and face paint. The tournament, a medieval inheritance, thus brought warriors from across the globe to life at the courts of an expanding Europe.
This lecture argues that even as global commerce intensified, chivalry continued to shape how Europeans envisioned distant societies, and that their response to the extra-European world was mediated not only by institutions of knowledge but also by a performative global imagination. These chivalric performances did not straightforwardly anticipate modern racial thinking, yet they made embodied difference, and Blackness above all, consistently salient. Drawing on images, festival accounts, court inventories, and surviving objects from the German-speaking courts of Central Europe, the lecture recovers a now deeply unfamiliar tradition of cross-racial performance, one that dropped out of view once nineteenth-century medievalism confined chivalry to the Middle Ages.
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Alexander Bevilacqua is associate professor of history at Williams College, where he teaches the history of early modern Europe, roughly from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. He is currently Samuel Kress Senior Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He is the author of The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Harvard 2018), which won the Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association and was translated into Arabic, Turkish, and Italian. His articles have appeared in journals including Past and Present and the Journal of Modern History; his most recent essay, on the Erfurt nature printer Johann Hieronymus Kniphof, will appear in the December edition of the journal Isis (it is already available online). He is an executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas and welcomes inquiries from graduate students and junior scholars. He is also an occasional contributor to the London Review of Books, for which he has written about false messiahs, eaters of images, scholarly precarity in the eighteenth-century German lands, and, most recently, British justifications of the slave trade.
