“Heraldic Gestures”
Susan Crane

Historians Maurice Keen, Malcolm Vale, and others have refuted the position of Johan Huizinga and his many followers that late medieval tournaments were empty spectacle and hollow show. By demonstrating that tournaments retained connections to warfare even as they became more ritualized and less lethal, these historians recover practical and ideological relations between jousting and military confrontations. But tournaments have another register of importance that has not received attention as yet: their showy and spectacular aspects, which even recent historians take to be superfluous, are not in fact at odds with their serious meaningfulness.

It is characteristic of ceremonial and ritual forms to produce their brightest flashes of display just where their most important claims are being conveyed. Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff note that secular ceremonies in general “epitomize the made-up quality of culture and almost invite notice as such. Yet their very form and purpose is to discourage untrammeled inquiry into such questions. Ceremonies convey most of their messages as postulates.” These related ideas will be at the base of my comments on a single tournament: its spectacular aspects reveal its ideological investments, but its investments are forcefully asserted, rather than explained and analyzed; these assertions in turn can be decoded by referring to theories of masking and totemic behavior.

At the Lille tournament hosted by Adolf of Cleves in February 1453/4, Adolf appeared in the guise of an ancestor, the Swan Knight. Chroniclers Olivier de la Marche and Mathieu d’Escouchy describe the elaborate heraldic and ceremonial behavior through which Adolf expressed his claim to a half-avian ancestor. Dozens of other fourteenth- and fifteenth-century descendants of Godefroi de Bouillon made reference to the Swan Knight in their heraldic crests, arms, and badges. 

I will argue that Adolf is deploying a kind of masking that does not disguise but instead enlarges identity. Uses of ancestor masks from antiquity through the nineteenth century engage in this kind of “concretion” between ancestors and descendants. The particular ancestor in question here, like the better-known Melusine, fuses human and animal natures. Totemic theory, particularly in poststructuralist responses to Claude Lévi-Strauss, clarifies what is at stake in claiming such an ancestor, and how the claim works within the mechanism of a tournament and its attendant festivities.