A Companion to Chivalry

Abstract

Handsomely designed and beautifully illustrated with color images, A Companion to Chivalry offers a multifaceted study of the development, influence, and performative role of chivalry in western Europe from its emergence in the twelfth century to its reimagination in Tudor political culture and beyond. This compendium of recent scholarship is of interest to those whose focus is on chivalric culture as well as to scholars whose work is influenced by the realities and ideals of chivalric societies during the European Middle Ages and beyond.The collection's opening chapter by Peter Coss on “The Origins and Diffusion of Chivalry” will inform and challenge specialists engaged with the questions of chivalry's origins and its development in European culture, as well as the influence of the scholarship of Maurice Keen on Chivalric Studies. Subsequent chapters survey the practices and impacts of chivalry including “The Secular Orders: Chivalry in the Service of the State” by David Green, “The Military Orders” by Helen J. Nicholson, “Chivalry in the Tournament and Pas d'Armes” by Richard Barber, “Marshalling the Chivalric Elite for War” and “Heraldry and Heralds” both by Robert W. Jones, and “Manuals of Warfare and Chivalry” by Matthew Bennett.David Simpkin's essay, “The Organisation of Chivalric Society,” offers a critical analysis of the tactics, successes, and failures of monarchs to harness the “primary, vital social forces” of chivalric culture (p. 52). Kings with the ability to channel and control chivalric cultural practices—for example, Edward I—could make “chivalric society work for rather than against them” (p. 40). Simpkin also identifies the tension between the “universalist language of chivalry” (p. 50) and the increasingly nationalistic loyalties of chivalric orders.Ralph Moffat's lively “Arms and Armour” demystifies references to a knight's essential equipment—from poleaxe to haubergeon—accompanied by excellent color plates. He grounds his discussion in the material culture of the international production of arms as well as outlining the requisite training. In addition, Moffat provides an explication of armor used in actual battle and literary references to the outfitting of a knight in works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. As Moffat notes, “the chivalrous warrior insisted on both style and substance“ (p. 172).For medievalists generally, there are several essays that will inform and intersect with a range of scholarship on medieval literature, history, and culture. Peter Sposato and Samuel Claussen's essay “Chivalric Violence” harrowingly reveals chivalry's “powerful influence on the practice of violence among knights and arm bearers across Europe” (p. 117) with examples from medieval Florence. Of particular note is Sposato and Claussen's argument that the “privileged practice of violence” (p. 117) was not limited to war or crusade, but justified and manifested in social violence against nonelite classes, including excessive violence in resolving civil disputes that “regularly inflicted the horrors of war on civilian populations” (p. 101). In light of this essay, studies in medieval history, art, and literature will re-reckon with the impact of chivalry across the realities and representations of class structures in medieval Europe.Equally innovative is Louise J. Wilkinson's essay, “Gendered Chivalry.” Wilkinson draws upon remarkable research into the material culture and artifacts of chivalric society to redefine the received view of women as passive bystanders irrelevant to the development and performance of chivalric culture. Citing an array of objects from aristocratic households, including seals, coats of arms, manuscript illuminations, clothing, towels, ivory mirror cases, cup lids, shields, religious vestments, tombs, and funerary monuments as well as literary and historical texts, Wilkinson convincingly argues that women played “a central, if subordinate, role” (p. 121) in creating chivalric culture in western Europe. Wilkinson demonstrates that women's presence and participation in chivalric events, patronage of literary works, symbolic role in preparations for tournaments, gift-giving, and resisting sieges all contributed to a vital activation of chivalric culture that, while it did little to change the status of women, did acknowledge and rely upon their role in society and within families. Women influenced contemporary literature as both sponsors and readers (p. 221); in addition, the spectatorship, jousting, feasting, and dancing associated with tournaments were “forms of elite entertainment for members of both sexes” (p. 224). Indeed, the cover of the collection depicts an iconic image of chivalry from the Codex Manesse (ca. 1300–1340) which Wilkinson discusses, in which aristocratic ladies bestow a token at a tournament. The frontispiece of the collection is a similarly iconic image from the Luttrell Psalter in which Agnes de Sutton and daughter-in-law Hawise le Despenser offer Sir Geoffrey Luttrell his helm and shield, presumably in preparation for battle or jousting. Both images exemplify Wilkinson's argument that women were not absent in chivalric culture but an integrated presence.In his essay “Constructing Chivalric Landscapes: Aristocratic Spaces Between Image and Reality,” Oliver Creighton offers a welcome spatial analysis of medieval landscapes, both literary and physical, that is sure to spark further studies on the creation and representation of chivalric space. Creighton notes “the variety and geographical spread of medieval designed landscape” included castles, moats, gardens, interior courtyards, pavilions, jousting fields, round table festivals, viewing stands, parks, and hunting grounds (p. 190) as well as the “pre-cartographic” experience of those spaces (p. 193). The setting of great country houses, he argues, “encoded the social values of the contemporary social elite” (p. 189). As “the centrepiece of the idealised chivalric landscape” (p. 198), the castle was not only an individual site, but rather a curated “sequencing of experiences” including approaching views, moats, gardens, as well as views from windows once within the castle. Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, Creighton points out, is “punctuated with over forty named castles” from his French sources (p. 198). A significant aspect of Malory's translation from his French sources included the transfer of such named sites to English geographical spaces. The creation of elite landscapes, Creighton argues, drew upon the nostalgia inherent in chivalric culture, utilizing “references to myth, legend, and ancient times” and embedding a sense of the past within these built landscapes (p. 191). Creighton argues that the management of these aristocratic environments was “an essential part of the materialisation of chivalric culture” (p. 217), one which played a key role “in the development and expression of chivalry” (p. 218).Joanna Bellis and Megan G. Leitch's essay “Chivalric Literature” elucidates the way in which historical romance and chivalric histories were related, “contiguous genres” (p. 256). In addition to similarities of action and ethos across romance and chronicle, the authors demonstrate that chivalric literature was “fully alert to its social function” in promoting chivalric ideals (p. 251). Bellis and Leitch identify an important self-reflexive trope: the reading of chivalric literature by characters or historical figures within the action of medieval romances and chronicles. This “Romanz reding on the bok,” they argue, was posited as “a central activity in a civilized chivalric society” (p. 250; the quotation is from Havelok the Dane.) William Caxton's publication The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry (1484) is just one example of a text that reinforced the premise that “the ethical improvement of ‘noble gentylmen’ could be furthered by appropriate reading” (p. 252). Both romance literature and chivalric histories reinforced chivalric reading as central to the inculcation of the values and virtues of loyalty and courtesy for the heroes of these narratives (p. 252). Such reflexivity of text and culture, Bellis and Leitch argue, augmented the circuits of chivalric practices via book culture and elite lifestyles.Matthew Woodcock upends the presumptive “end of chivalry,” pointing out that its supposed demise was always already knit into the expression of chivalry, even while chivalric culture flourished. He references the trace of nostalgia in chivalric culture as early as the twelfth century in the writing of Peter of Blois: “They do not know what knights and chivalry mean” (p. 281). This sense of retrospection and idealism, he argues, continued through the fifteenth century as the height of chivalric culture began to wane: “O ye knyghtes of Englond,” wrote William Caxton in The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry, “where is the custome and usage of noble chyvalry that was used in tho days?” (p. 281). Chivalric writers, in other words, long noted that the lived reality of knights was “disordred fro chivalry” as an ideal. Woodcock suggests that a “synchronic contestation” (p. 285) of chivalric discourse continued in Tudor culture, taking on new, potent forms not only in entertainment, but also in debates about honor and public service, in English “maritime and colonial adventuring,” and in constructions of military identity (p. 290).The collection's final essay, “Chivalric Medievalism” by Clare Simmons, surveys Twain's critique and Tennyson's reimagining of medieval chivalry but more interestingly calls attention to lesser known but no less influential nineteenth-century English works, including Kenelm Henry Digby's Broad Stone of Honor (1823), a compendious one-thousand-page “history” of chivalry and conduct book, as well as a welcome overview, suitable both for graduate students and for contextual readings in courses in Medieval Studies. The continued depiction of the medieval tournament in twenty-first century entertainment such as Game of Thrones, Simmons argues, “owes at least as much to nineteenth-century chivalric medievalism as to the chivalry of the middle ages” (p. 302).This fine collection adds meticulous scholarship and nuance to the field as well as a welcome overview suitable both for graduate students and for contextual readings in courses in Medieval Studies.