Valedictory Lecture: Professor Alan V. Murray

Tournaments are popularly perceived as a basic component of medieval culture, but the serious academic study of tournaments dates only from the 1980s. This lecture begins by showing how and why such diverse forms developed in the period 1050-1550, also considering why so many of the medieval great and good were willing to put such effort and resources into taking part in an expensive and potentially dangerous pursuit. It goes on to offer a taste from the author’s forthcoming book on Ulrich von Liechtenstein, a wealthy nobleman and passionate jouster from thirteenth-century Styria. It argues that the innovative tournament forms devised by Ulrich can be seen as an attempt to provide validation for the noble society of Styria and Austria by identifying it with the aspirational chivalry of contemporary Arthurian literature.

Professor Alan V. Murray studied History and German Language and Literature at the University of St Andrews, with periods of work or research in Vienna, Salzburg, Erlangen and Freiburg. He joined the University of Leeds in 1988 as an Editorial Assistant with the International Medieval Bibliography and retired in 2026 as Professor of Medieval European History. His earliest research was on the First Crusade and the history of the kingdom of Jerusalem, but over the years his interests and publications have developed and expanded to take in a wide range of aspects of medieval warfare, tournaments, chivalric literature and crusading. More recently he has been a proponent of the revival of research in the medieval Baltic region and in 2025 received an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Tartu in recognition of his contributions to Estonian history.