Expérimenter le maniement des armes à la fin du Moyen Âge / Experimente zur Waffenhandhabung im Spätmittelalter. Daniel Jaquet and Nicolas Baptiste, eds. Itinera 39. Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2016. 182 pp. €48.
by hegemony. A good example of such an exploration is Karin Ueltsch’s essay on fantastical, phantom armies and combats, a study rich in anthropological and theological insight: they appear here as a tangential response to deep medieval social and personal anxieties. Martin Aurell in a display of considerable erudition also addresses social fractures, in his case the theocratic claims to primacy in society over the warrior and king, exploring its expression and resistance to it through Robert de Boron’s motif of the sword locked into a stone: “une hymne à théocratie” (37–63). Edina Bozoky explores the very antithesis of Excalibur, in her evocative and enjoyable study of the sword of Attila—a character of some ambivalence in medieval literature as early as the tenth-century epic Walther. A sword, alleged to be of the great Hun, became an item in the treasury of the kings of Hungary—to whom he was a quasi-Arthur—though as with Excalibur it also turned up in other rulers’ treasuries. Such swords had power, and Bozoky demonstrates with some cultural élan how this particular symbol has mutated in a variety of media, story, history, song, and DVD in the Magyar imagination (357–68). These are just a few instances of a volume rich in unexpected insights and significant observations.