The creation of universities and the increasing provision of grammar schools clearly increased the demand for books. A lay readership was in existance before Gutenberg began to print with movable type. Manuscript production was a thriving industry even though subject to guild restrictions. Many vernacular works from these industries were printed on paper, which was cheaper to produce than parchment. They met the demand for cheaper, often unbound books in England.

Northern European typefaces also tended to imitate the hands of the late fifteenth century manuscrips, especially the so-called Burgundian "bastard" script.

The Church's resistance to tournament because it could be an occasion for violence, excess, bloodshed, and eroticism was overcome in the fourteenth century when some of its more lethal elements were gradually eliminated, but were sometimes dangerous with fatal casualties. In German lands, the practice of Scharfrennen, jousting with sharpend lances instead of blunted ones, was popular among nobles renowned for their private feuding.

The medieval tournament had also assumed a theatrical character since the 13th century. Arthurian romance, widely popularized by 1230 through the works of Cretian de Troyes in France and Gottfried von Strasbourg in Germany, provided themes suitable for dramatized re-enactments at a tournament. Arthurian-based Round Tables were formed by groups or teams of knights and the fiction that a tournament took place under the patronage of Arthur and his knights is found in 1278 at the encounters at Le Hem in northern France. Thre was an honored place for noblewomen on these occasions, and the blend of military prowess and amorous persuit, which was condemned by the institutional Church, could be a heady mixture for young nobles. By 1316 however, papal disapproval of the tournament was greatly moderated by John XXII and the Church's recognition of the new secular chivalric orders (The Garter, Star, Crescent, or Golden Fleece) of the fourteenth and fifteenth centruies was an indication of a change in attitude.

The Oxford History of Medieval Europe, ed George Holms, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 (p 319-321)

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