7The Renaissance is best known as an age of artists--Michelangelo, da Vinci, Titian, and Holbein--but it was also an age of noble patrons who challenged their painters and sculptors to create great art. These patrons were knights, military leaders, and jousters, and they played a central role in the creation of another great Renaissance story: that of the armourer.

In Arms and Armour of the Renaissance Joust, Tobias Capwell provides an illuminating history of jousting seen through the surviving artifacts in the collection of the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. He reveals how the jousts and tournaments of the Renaissance transported knightly combat into a kind of performance art, with demonstrations of aristocratic skill and nerve, superhuman strength and superlative horsemanship, and cutting-edge equipment. Accompanied by one hundred color illustrations, this volume's publication marks the five hundredth anniversary of the Field of Cloth of Gold, which took place in 1520 and is considered the greatest tournament of the Tudor age.