European noblewomen ritually decapitated clay Moor effigies in courtly games.

Evidence

These carousels, the entertaining successors of medieval tournaments, were exceedingly popular in the Baroque era. Ladies’ carousels continued to be performed in the Winter Riding School until the end of the nineteenth century. As the programme for the ceremony of 1743 days, the participants in the carousel, all ladies of noble birth, were dressed as “amazons” and wore leather trousers underneath their dresses. Like at medieval tournaments, figures, which were “in part Moors, in part other mythological figures,” and had heads of clay which had to be knocked off with lances by the riders on horseback and with epees by the ladies driving in the carriages, were put up in the manege of the Winter Riding School. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 344

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Direct evidence for the manufacture of the Muslim monster in high court ritual — connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s cross-cultural bodily display theme (amazons, leather trousers) and to the reader’s core thesis of image preceding contact.
• SEED: Angle: the ladies’ carousel as a gendered performance of imperial violence — noblewomen literally beheading clay Moors as courtly entertainment, showing how the monster-image was reproduced as leisure.

Related

• Noble ladies played at decapitating Moor effigies for centuries. (similarity 0.92)
• Noblewomen at court decapitated clay Moor and Turk heads as sport until 1900. (similarity 0.91)