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Chivalry Archive
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English Writings on Chivalry and Warfare during the Hundred Years War
Posted on May 18, 2013 | No CommentsAlongside the Old Testament stories of famous warriors like Joshua and Judas Maccabeus, these chivalric tales were to provide Oldcastle with the appropriate models for knightly behaviour that would, in turn, restore him to the path of heterodoxy. -
Chivalry and Public Disorder in Thirteenth-Century Florence
Posted on May 13, 2013 | No CommentsThe was the second of two fabulous papers given at the my first session on Medieval violence. Whereas the first paper in this series looked at violence in the university setting, this one tackled violence in an elite sphere - Florentine knights and their retinues. -
War and Peace in the Works of Chaucer and his Contemporaries
Posted on May 1, 2013 | No CommentsBut whenever authors of work on chivalry and war during the Middle Ages have tried to determine the exact historical influence and result of chivalric ideals, they have run into difficulties. That is why there are such widely varying hypotheses concerning the 'Golden Age' of chivalry. -
European Chivalry in the 1490s
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper's first goal is to give some idea of the atmosphere of the decade, of the pervasiveness of this chivalric element. Chivalry functioned as a medium for international understanding and communication, a common social, cultural, political, and even religious language. -
Chaucer’s Arthuriana
Posted on March 18, 2013 | No CommentsThe majority of medieval scholars, including Roger Sherman Loomis, argue that the popularity of the Arthurian legend in England was therefore on the wane in the latter half of the fourteenth century; as a result, the major writers of the period, such as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, refrained from penning anything beyond the occasional reference to King Arthur and his court. -
Interpreting Warfare and Knighthood in Late Medieval France: Writers and Their Sources in the Reign of King Charles VI (1380-1422)
Posted on March 10, 2013 | No CommentsRomances provided the basis of a particular kind of view of knighthood and warfare that was very influential on other literature concerning knights and warfare, as much as it was on real life practices and attitudes. -
Traditions of Courtly Love and the Canterbury Tales
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsChaucer uses both common and courtly love in the Canterbury Tales. His pilgrims represent nearly every level of the social scale and range anywhere from a knight to a miller to a parson to a pardoner. Thererfore, their status will determine what kind of tale they will tell. -
Mi Suete Leuedi, Her Mi Béne: The Power and Patronage of the Heroine in Middle English Romance
Posted on February 10, 2013 | No CommentsThe Middle English Romances are somewhat difficult to study as a group. In order to examine these works accurately, one must take into consideration other literature produced at the same tirne, as well as that which preceded it. -
Oh, for Shame: Public Perception and Punishment in Chretien’s Cliges
Posted on February 9, 2013 | No CommentsTo develop this argument, a basic understanding of medieval society's conventions is necessary in order to outline the parameters of this honor/shame culture. -
How useful is Blind Hary’s ‘The Wallace’ as a source for the study of chivalry in late medieval Scotland?
Posted on January 26, 2013 | No CommentsWhat scholars consider to have constituted a chivalric attitude needs to be considered at this point. To live the chivalrous life was to seek to imitate the great deeds of others, which could be learned from the extensive literature that dealt with the idea of knighthood. In chivalric literature, the knight was expected to have a strong sense of personal honour and had to be willing to defend it against affronts -
Women, children and the profits of war
Posted on January 24, 2013 | No CommentsThroughout the middle ages when men went to war, they expected to make a profit, to take plunder and capture prisoners. -
The genesis of chivalry project receives £137,000 in funding
Posted on January 11, 2013 | No CommentsDavid Crouch of the University of Hull will be able to explore the origins of chivalry in the Middle Ages after being award a Research Fellowship of £137,629 from the Leverhulme Trust. -
Tournament Culture in the Low Countries and England
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsIn England and the Low Countries towards the end of the thirteenth century, a common chivalric culture had emerged which permitted exchanges and mutual participation in tournaments on both sides of the Channel. -
“At the Tip of a Sword”: A Study of the Introduction of the Knight into Anglo-Saxon England
Posted on November 21, 2012 | No CommentsNevertheless the introduction of the knight into England still remains a controversial topic of discussion among military historians, since the people who inhabited England prior to 1066 were part of warrior culture as well: the Anglo-Saxons. -
The Knighting of Henry, son of William the Conqueror, in 1086
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper was part of SESSION VIII: Power & Politics in the Long Twelfth Century, at the Haskins Conference at Boston College. -
Missionaries and Crusaders in Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur
Posted on November 18, 2012 | No CommentsThe War of Roses might have been the most prominent event on the English political stage at the time when the Morte d’Arthur was written, and there is evidence that Malory’s writing was in part informed by he civil discord he was witnessing. -
How to be a Man, Though Female: Changing Sex in Medieval Romance
Posted on November 12, 2012 | No CommentsGender participates in a series of taxonomies that structure the social order, and it therefore participates in processes beyond itself, such as Christianity and knighthood, which are equally about identity within the world of chivalric romance. Therefore, the inscription of one often helps to define the other. -
SESSION III: The Medieval Experience of Siege
Posted on November 6, 2012 | No CommentsThese are two papers from SESSION III: The Medieval Experience of Siege given at Boston College's Haskin's Conference. The first paper examined knightly interaction during sieges and the second paper delved into the actions of the besieged and besiegers during times of war. -
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci?”: Gawain’s Knightly Identity and the Role of Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Posted on October 26, 2012 | No CommentsIt is easy to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a romantic celebration of chivalry, but this romance contains a more wide-ranging, more serious criticism of chivalry than has heretofore been noticed. -
Mandeville’s Intolerance: The Contest for Souls and Sacred Sites in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
Posted on October 3, 2012 | No CommentsWhile Chaucer‟s knight has traveled to and fought in Spain, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia Minor, Sir John claims to have visited the entire known world from Constantinople and the Holy Land to the farthest reaches of Asia. -
Monstrous transformations: loyalty and community in four medieval poems
Posted on September 23, 2012 | No CommentsI will examine two forms of transformation, the werewolf transformation and the monstrous human transformation, both of which feature shape shifters who presumably cannot be trusted -
Practical Chivalry in the Twelfth Century: The Case of William Marshal
Posted on August 24, 2012 | No CommentsWilliam Marshal (c.1147-1219) is among the most extraordinary individuals in medieval English history. -
Fayttes of Armes and of Chyvalrye
Posted on July 29, 2012 | No CommentsMalory's Morte Darthur, as Caxton entitled it in his print of 1485, is well known and widely admired. This paper will try to relate it to an important part of its literary and cultural background, the fifteenth-century 'literature of knighthood' or 'literature of nobility', which is not well known and not admired at all. -
Changes of Medieval Chivalry Virtues – Secret Guy of Warwick
Posted on July 11, 2012 | No CommentsThe author of this thesis has decided to compare the chivalry knightly virtues with the values of the present–day army, because she has always been interested in the stories about knights fighting against the Saracens, and has always admired some of the knightly virtues such as courage, honesty, loyalty or mercy. -
“Thus he rode sorowyng”: Travel Narratives and the Ethics of Sexual Behavior in Le Morte d’Arthur
Posted on June 23, 2012 | No CommentsThe Arthurian oeuvre traditionally maintains a plot structure that requires knights to depart from the Round Table, either as a response to a challenge or in quest of chivalric “aventure,” followed by a return to Camelot. Within this narrative framework, there exists an intricately designed logic to descriptions of movement and travel. In particular, sex and travel appear inseparable.