This chapter outlines the complex relationship between a performance’s intended meanings and its reception by various audiences. Given the lack of contemporary evidence, many scholars have generalized what can be considered universal aspects of public spectacle, such as the presence of cues meant to help spectators understand the purpose and structure of a performance. Such cues are, and were, often meant to inform the audience of their proper roles: where to direct their attention, what to wear, when to stand, applaud, or be silent. Yet audiences do not always do what they are told. They might be disruptive, apathetic, or overly enthusiastic. And even when they do behave as intended, we cannot assume that this demonstrates their agreement with the performance. The spectators’ lament and acclamation at the Farce of Ávila, for instance, has been taken as evidence of their complicity. In fact, these acts reveal little of their actual reactions to the event.
The crowd’s behavior instead points to a central problem in the interpretation of medieval spectacles: eyewitnesses did not typically record their personal experiences, leaving us to reconstruct them through accounts from other sources. These include subjective descriptions penned by (usually) elite authors as well as legal codes and ordinances. Attempts to legislate proper behavior at public performances, to give one example, might indicate the kinds of disorderly conduct organizers expected to encounter. Since the sources offer limited insight at best, many scholars have dismissed audiences, considering them only when particularly strong reactions were recorded. Spectator responses, however, were rarely unanimous and usually fell somewhere between blatant complicity and opposition.
To understand the experience of the crowd, we therefore must look beyond contemporary accounts to approach what one scholar has called the “culture of the spectator.”3 Spectators were both free and constrained in their reactions as a host of individual factors (such as class, gender, and religion) interacted with both community solidarity and fragmenting social tensions. Individual spectator responses were influenced by these divergent pressures, by the staging and enactment of the spectacle, and by the physical surroundings. They were therefore unpredictable. At the same time, the reactions of surrounding members of the audience can have a powerful influence on the individual, channeling his or her latent reactions into a few particular directions. This ultimately limited the potential for destabilizing or subversive outbursts.
Multiple influences, thus, acted simultaneously to regulate the range of potential audience responses. Prominent among them were widely held opinions about certain subjects. In this chapter, I consider debates regarding knightly tournaments, one of the most popular and most controversial forms of spectacle at the time. By considering in turn each of the three orders of medieval society as understood at the time—the nobility, the church, and the populace—we can see how each produced independent strands of discourse. The many arguments made to rationalize or condemn festive military exercises as well as the ways in which these strands intersected and overlapped created a network of competing alliances and perspectives. Although these did not strictly curtail an individual’s potential responses, they did set limits within which onlooker experiences were likely to fall.
Although the focus is on tournaments, there were no absolute divisions between types of spectacle at this time. Fifteenth-century tournaments often included dramatic performances and popular festivities. Sometimes they even coincided with religious processions. This merging of genres resulted in part from a repurposing of tournaments, which previously had been limited to courtly settings. They were now presented in urban contexts to mixed audiences, leading sponsors to integrate popular and ecclesiastic elements in order to enhance their appeal. The pressures of the frontier, moreover, had created new social networks and alliances. Physical and ideological uncertainty undermined, or perhaps transcended, the traditional “three orders of society.” We must be careful, therefore, about lumping frontier spectacles into a general category of urban performances.
Such an analysis, moreover, is based in part on modern observations of crowd behavior, raising the question of the degree to which we can fruitfully draw comparisons between modern and medieval spectacles. Most references to twentieth- and twenty-first-century mass culture made by historians of medieval Castile are impressionistic, intended to clarify concepts through comparison to a familiar phenomenon or to lament enduring inequalities. This approach permits the reader to visualize the events more fully but raises epistemological questions. Do modern renditions of public spectacles, often enacted at least in part for tourist audiences, bear anything in common with their medieval antecedents? Or do such comparisons ultimately delude us into thinking that we can understand experiences that have been irretrievably lost?
Book layouts can help to explain how modern analogies might apply to medieval public spectacle. A modern scholarly text includes a number of features that help readers orient themselves and access critical information, including a table of contents, footnotes, page numbers, and indexes. Such tools are relatively specific, requiring a basic level of cultural literacy for easy use. The location and format of these finding aids vary widely and we would not expect to see the same layout for a novel, for instance, as for a scientific textbook. Similarly, the mise-en-page of a medieval manuscript contains helpful features, including the organization of the page into columns that accommodated glosses and commentaries and the use of incipits and initials, all of which permit the experienced reader to move quickly and easily about the text. Both the modern printed book and the medieval manuscript offer solutions to the universal challenge of efficiently navigating a long text. Both, moreover, are part of the same centuries-long tradition. Thus, although far from identical, they bear enough commonalities that meaningful comparisons can be drawn between them. To put it another way, book layouts that mark different stages of the same process of development can be said to be written in the same language.
Public performances contain similar cues meant to help the audience navigate the event’s content and meaning. These range from overt messages clear to everyone present to subtle signals meant for only a few. As with books, some measure of cultural literacy is required to make sense of them. Such prompts are often visual, with particular combinations of color or symbols expressing complex messages about the nature of the spectacle.4 But they can also be verbal, with explicit statements or the tone of a speaker’s voice pointing the audience in the desired direction. Styles of dress, written signs, verbal hints, the layout of the venue: these cues act in concert to inform spectators of the type of event presented, its structure, its message, and their role. The audience can also add its own prompts, whether invited to do so or not. As these can materially affect the unfolding of the spectacle, the boundary between actors and audience is often murky.
At times, spectators play an invited, supportive role in a spectacle. Fans at modern sporting events create banners, perform synchronized gestures, engage in chants. The applause at a concert or play is an expected response that not only signals the audience’s approval but also acts as a ritualized conclusion to the performance. But audience responses do not always fit with the intended aims of a spectacle. Public spectacles always bore the possibility that some groups would take advantage of the assembled masses to advance unofficial agendas.
The interpretation of crowd reactions is often difficult. Even when we know what audience members did or said in response to a particular event, it is not always clear whether they acted to bolster or challenge its intended meaning. The response of the crowd to the Farce of Ávila is a case in point. Angus MacKay has argued that the rebel leaders sought to overcome a challenge inherent in replacing a reigning monarch: there could not be two living kings in the same