Justin Sturgeon, Text and image in René d'Anjou's 'Livre des Tournois': constructing authority and identity in fifteenth-century court culture: presented with a critical edition of BnF, ms. français 2695, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2022

Exhaustively detailed, this three-volume set covers all aspects of René d'Anjou's 'Livre des tournois' or Tournament Book. René d'Anjou's 'Livre des tournois' is famous as the most substantial account of the organisation of a medieval tournament that has come down to us. It survives in eight manuscripts, most of which have an almost identical layout; the best of these is a magnificent work of art in its own right. But these manuscripts have a further interest to the historian of culture, because they represent in effect the evidence for one of the first illustrated manuals, in which text and image are complementary, and form a single whole. The copyists understood this, and followed the original because the mise en page was an essential part of the whole. Justin Sturgeon's interdisciplinary study reveals the patterns and relationships which give the manual its very specific character