The Second Edition of the Famous German Tournament Book with Hundreds of Heraldic Woodcuts
Rüxner, Georg. ANfang, urspru[n]g unnd herkomen des Thurniers inn Teutscher nation […]. Simmern, Hieronimus Rodler, 1532.
The rare second edition of Georg Rüxner’s famous Turnierbuch, one of the great heraldic and chivalric books of Renaissance Germany, here preserved in a remarkable contemporary coloured copy from the old collection of the Alsatian barons of Fleckenstein.
Printed only two years after the celebrated first edition of 1530, the present edition was evidently conceived for somewhat wider aristocratic circulation while retaining the essential visual and genealogical structure of the original. The reduction in scale and illustration program made the book more practical, but did nothing to diminish its importance as a monumental assertion of noble identity during the social upheavals of the early modern period.
Edition & Physical Description
Large folio (approximately 313 × 212 mm).
Illustrated with a large title initial, full-page imperial arms, a double-page folding tournament plate, 40 predominantly half-page woodcuts, approximately 247 heraldic woodcuts, and printer’s device, all executed in woodcut and coloured by a contemporary hand throughout in blue, grey, black, brown, red, pink, green, and yellow.
Modern wooden-board binding with pigskin spine and blind-tooled title, preserved in a modern brown half-morocco case lined with felt. The colouring creates a particularly striking visual effect across the heraldic program, allowing the coats of arms to function fully as aristocratic identifiers rather than merely decorative devices.
The “Normal” Edition of a Noble Bestseller
The extraordinary success of the first edition quickly demonstrated that Rüxner’s book answered a deep need within the German nobility.
The old tournament aristocracy faced increasing pressure from territorial centralization, bureaucratic administration, urban elites, and newly ennobled families. Rüxner’s chronicle offered genealogical reassurance and ceremonial continuity at a moment when noble identity itself was becoming unstable.
Unlike the lavish first edition of 1530, which was probably conceived as a luxury prestige production in relatively small numbers, the second edition adopted a somewhat more economical structure. The number of large narrative woodcuts was reduced from 135 to 40, and a smaller Fraktur typeface was introduced, effectively halving the overall size of the work. Yet the essential visual architecture remained intact: the great heraldic sequences, the folding tournament scene, and the dynastic structure of the book all survive substantially unchanged.
Chivalry Preserved in Print
Rüxner’s larger ambition was not simply antiquarian.
The Turnierbuch sought to define who legitimately belonged to the knightly order itself. Through exhaustive lists of participants, genealogies, heraldic sequences, tournament ordinances, and dynastic affiliations, the book transformed aristocratic memory into printed authority.
Modern scholarship has demonstrated that many of the earliest tournaments described by Rüxner were entirely fictional reconstructions. Yet historical precision was not really the point. The work functioned instead as a grand symbolic genealogy of German knighthood, connecting contemporary noble families to an imagined continuous tournament tradition stretching back to Henry the Fowler in the tenth century.
The shift from oral and ceremonial aristocratic culture toward textual legitimacy becomes almost visible in the book itself. Noble identity increasingly depended not merely on inherited memory but on printed documentation.
The Contemporary Colouring
The present copy is especially remarkable for its extensive contemporary colouring.
Every heraldic device has been carefully coloured by hand in blue, green, yellow, red, brown, black, pink, and grey. In practical terms this was not merely decorative. The colouring allowed the coats of arms to become fully legible and identifiable within the aristocratic genealogical system.
One revealing annotation appears beside the arms of “Reynhardt vonn Ratzumhauß,” where a contemporary reader corrected two mistaken colours in manuscript, noting “soll rot sein” and “soll grün sein.” The heraldic precision clearly mattered deeply to the owner.
The result is a copy that moves significantly closer to the world of illuminated manuscripts and ceremonial heraldic rolls than to ordinary printed books.
The Fleckenstein Provenance
Although the volume contains no explicit ex libris, the provenance can be reconstructed with unusual precision through the reader’s markings.
Throughout the book, names such as “Flecksteyn,” “Landßperg,” and “Ratzumhauß” are repeatedly underlined. These correspond to interconnected Alsatian imperial knightly families within the same marriage network. The evidence strongly suggests ownership by Friedrich-Jakob von Fleckenstein-Windeck (1666–1710), whose ancestors are precisely the noble lineages emphasized throughout the annotations.
The Fleckensteins were among the most distinguished knightly families of Alsace. Their great fortress of Fleckenstein, situated near the Palatine frontier, was famous enough to be illustrated by Daniel Specklin in his Architectura von Vestungen. Several members of the family served the Electoral Palatinate and would certainly have known Rüxner’s work intimately.
The volume appears to have remained within the family until the extinction of the male line in the early eighteenth century, preserving its role as a genealogical and dynastic monument across generations.
Literature
BM STC German 760; Brunet IV, 1471; Davies, Fairfax Murray German 373; Graesse VI/1, 188; Rahir 625; VD16 R 3542; Vinet 2037.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 44:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume I
