Download PDF | Saul, N. - Chivalry in Medieval England-Harvard University Press (2011).
439 Pages
Preface
To write about chivalry in medieval England is to embark on a voyage through a world at once glamorous and violent, alluring and yet elusive. For many, chivalry evokes images of knights in shining armour, menfolk competing for the attention of a fair lady, pennons and streamers fl uttering from castle battlements. Much of this picture is a product of the nineteenth-century romanticisation of the Middle Ages – the kind of re-creation that gave us Waterhouse’s ‘Lady of Shalott’ and Viollet-le-Duc’s rebuilding of Carcassonne. Its roots lay in an idealised view of the medieval past which grew up in reaction to the horrors of the grim industrialisation of the time.
The real medieval world was altogether less lyrical and more down-to-earth than the fanciful re-creation. Nonetheless, we know enough about the cultural achievements of the Middle Ages to be aware that the image of the fully accoutred mounted knight was one which attracted and captivated contemporaries. The tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table inspired a whole genre of vernacular romance literature.
The prowess of the knights of the Hundred Years War was celebrated in Froissart’s Chronicle, one of the most compelling narrative accounts of the medieval period. From the early twelfth century the knightly class dominated the secular landscape of western Europe, spawning an aristocratic culture which was shaped in their heroic image and refl ected their martial values. It is that richly layered chivalric world, which has done so much to infl uence our own view of the Middle Ages, which is the subject of this book. Over a quarter of a century ago another book was published which was to be the point of departure for all modern studies of chivalry. This was Maurice Keen’s Chivalry, an ambitious, pioneering work which rescued chivalry from the hands of lyrical escapists and placed it fi rmly in the forefront of medieval studies. The aim of the present volume is to build on the foundations which Keen laid and to do so by engaging with his legacy more specifi cally in the context of medieval England.
The book will accordingly concern itself with how chivalry shaped both the practice of kingship in England and the expectations which people had of their kings, with how it spawned a rich and distinctive aristocratic culture, and how its values infused aristocratic codes of behaviour and personal piety. It will look, too, at the knights and gentry at home, at their changing role in society and their place in local offi ce-holding and administration. It will look at the architecture of chivalry, at the castles and fortifi cations which were the outward face of the aristocratic elite and proclaimed its militant values. It will look at aristocratic women and their relationship with chivalric culture.
Finally, it will attempt a consideration of what the legacy of chivalry might be to us today. Chivalry was the value system and behavioural code of the secular aristocratic elite of the Middle Ages. Studying it focuses our attention on the social group which made the biggest and most forceful impact on the contemporary world. It affords us the opportunity to explore a world at once colourful and visual, mannered and polite, prickly and violent. It introduces us to a society whose values were very different from our own.
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