chronicles of courtly love and chivalry, often in recently reworked prose versions emanating from the Burgundian court.
There was no reason why this should not have been so. Ideas of chivalry were still dominant among the ruling classes, while urban patricians and merchants imitated the nobility, staging their own chivalric displays. However, the cult of chivalry in the later Middle Ages has often been presented as a hollow sham, the mere husk or shell of what had once been a vigorous and dynamic military and social code. This is to lay too great a stress upon the concept of high medieval idealism (which existed only in theory) in contrast to later medieval decay. Chivalry and the cult of knighthood had certainly received an infusion of religious sentiment and idealism during the twelfth century, but it was in origin an essentially secular ideology. The Church's resistance to the tournament, for example, because it could be an occasion for violence, excess, bloodshed, and eroticism, was only overcome in the fourteenth century when some of its more lethal elements were gradually eliminated. But even in the period from 1350 to 1500, jousts and tournois were sometimes very dangerous, with fatal casualties. In the German lands the practice of the Scharfrennen, or jousting with sharpened rather than blunted lances, was a popular activity among nobles renowed for their private feuding. The tournament, however elaborate, artificial, and theatrical it was, could act as a safety-valve for noble violence and probably both Charles the Bold of Burgundy and Maximilian I of Habsburg recognized this fact in their patronage of chivalric encounters that could become very rough, where vendetta had its place.
The medieval tournament, in both the collective forms of tournois or mêlée and the more individualistic joust, had also assumed a theatrical character since the early thirteenth century. Arthurian romance, widely popularized by 1230 through the works of Chrétien de Troyes in France and Gottfried von Strasbourg or the anonymous author of Moriz von Craun in Germany, provided themes suitable for dramatized re-enactment at a tournament. Arthurian-based Round Tables were formed by groups or teams of knights and the fiction that a tournament took place under the patronage of Arthur and his knights
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