The New Year's Tournament, very large miniature cut from an illuminated Tournament Manual, in French, manuscript on vellum

The text on the verso is from a manuscript of a Tournament manual written in the early sixteenth century, and describes the arrival of contestants for the monthly festivals, the greatest of which takes place at New Year. Firstly, the young women emerge in groups of ten, and are judged on their beauty. The most beautiful sits in the Queen's box, which is draped in gold and silk. The miniature shows her presenting a single flower to the victorious knight.

The tournament and chivalric combat are among the quintessential images of the medieval world. Tournaments existed as early as the mid-twelfth century, appearing in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes as well as more mundane sources such as a charter from the 1120s recording that its grantor, a Warwickshire knight named Osbert of Arden, had travelled to France to take part in these pursuits. The great tournaments of northern France habitually attracted many hundreds of knights from across Europe, and in November 1179 some 3000 knights attended the tournament at Lagny-sur-Marne held by Louis VII of France in honour of his son's coronation. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw a growing interest in the writing of chivalric manuals for these noble entertainments, and examples exist in a number of vernacular languages, including King René d'Anjou's, Traictié de la forme et devise d'ung tournoy, written c.1460, and Pero Rodríguez de Lena's, El passo honroso de Suero de Quiñones, written in the fifteenth century. Such texts remained popular among aristocrats into the sixteenth century, and were often produced on a grand scale with numerous large miniatures such as the present example.

The style of the painting is close to the production of  Antoine Vérard, printer and bookseller,  for the royal court and other patrons (cf. the miniature by that artist of Lancelot knighting his own son in a printed book of 1494, reproduced in O. Pächt, Französische Gotik und Renaissance in Meisterwerken der Buchmalerei, 1978, no. 75, pl. 78). The faces of the women with a single black horizontal line defining the bottom of their noses, and frame of architectural columns here are particularly close to that of illuminators employed by Vérard's work, and the present miniature may be from his own workshop.