Conference: Combat, spectacle, sport and war – Royal Armouries Museum

The brutality of the Roman practice of having people fight, often to the death, as a means of entertainment has ensured its enduring place in the popular mind. Yet the history of sport and war are more closely entwined than this outlier suggests. Medieval hunts and tournaments shaped the knight’s body for war, just as hunting in Mughal India trained warriors to fight from horseback, and Japanese Yabusame archery fuses training sport with religious ritual. Likewise, modern-day social media observers ‘like’ and ‘share’ short, often gruesome clips of combat from Ukraine to the Middle East with all the relish of Roman spectators at the arena.

This two-day conference is intended to provide a platform for considering the social, political and cultural significance of both combat as spectacle and sport and war, without restriction of time and space. With the Royal Armouries, the national collection of arms and armour, as the backdrop, it seeks to link the latest intellectual discoveries with the benefits of working up-close with collections and artefacts. See our website for further information.

This conference is part of the supporting programme for our blockbuster exhibition: Gladiators: Heroes of the Colosseum

Image: 'Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant' (Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1859). Public domain: Yale University/Wikimedia Commons