Gazing at Gawain: Reconsidering Tournaments, Courtly Love, and the Lady Who Looks

Historians have long acknowledged the importance of the female spectator in actual, staged, tournaments, and literary critics have noted her intrinsic role in the tournaments of romance texts.In both cases, she functions as an inspiration to the male knight performing on the field, and as a means of constructing his masculinity.The potential agency of this female spectator who was able to look down on male bodies from a privileged viewing position has, however, been generally overlooked by art historians.This article uses the tournament context, in which women look at men (and vice versa), as a way of moving beyond the binary oppositions such as masculine/feminine, active/passive, that have traditionally structured discussions of gender and the gaze. By looking in particular at the imagery on carved ivory objects made for women, and their relationship to contemporary literature, I will argue for a more nuanced consideration of the ways women were able to look in the Middle Ages.