The “Discrete Occupational Identity” of Chaucer’s Knyght
Popular critical opinion favors reading the pilgrim Knyght of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales as the representative of the idealized chivalric knight; however, the pilgrim Knyght bears the hallmark of the early professional soldier that began to evolve as early as the eleventh century.
Parzival, the perfect Medieval hero?
When we now think of knights, we automatically think of knights in shining armours, saving damsels in distress while killing dragons and other mythical creatures. But is this image we have of these heroes correct? Was the Medieval hero really just a tough guy who saved beautiful ladies and killed the ´bad guys´. In this paper I will try to give a standard description of what a Medieval hero really was. After which I will try to determine if Parzival really was a medieval hero, compared to the standards that I have tried to set.
Christian warriors and the enslavement of fellow Christians
In this paper I shall argue that this most striking innovation was fundamental to the emergence of an effective notion of non-combatant immunity, itself widely regarded as the key norm in modern discussions of ius in bello.
Chaucer’s reading list: Sir Thopas, Auchinleck, and Middle English romances in translation
One frustration of engaging in any branch of European medieval studies as an academic pursuit is that few claim expertise about the ancient or Roman worlds, but seemingly everyone on an internet discussion forum believes him or herself knowledgeable about the medieval period, usually based on patently false beliefs.
The Unicorn, St Andrew and the Thistle: Was there an Order of Chivalry in Late Medieval Scotland?
A common expression of kingship throughout Europe in the fifteenth century was the founding of orders of chivalry. Whether the Scottish crown also attempted to appropriate the ideologies of chivalry in this way is important to establish.
“The Taint of a Fault”: Purgatory, Relativism and Humanism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
“The Taint of a Fault”: Purgatory, Relativism and Humanism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Bill Phillips Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, No.…
Transvestite Knights: Men and Women Cross-dressing in Medieval Literature
In this thesis, I will look at mainly French and German texts from the 12th to the 15th centuries which deal with the subject of cross-dressers in the decidedly masculine domain of the knight. There are many tales of cross-dressing, particularly of women, but the concept of men dressing as women while jousting, and women dressing as knights, brings up several questions about the clothes, what it meant to be male and female, and how cross-dressing could be viewed on the tournament field.
Knighthood in later medieval Italy
There is a clear reason for this general discounting of Italian knighthood in the later Middle Ages. The traditional focus of northern Italian historiography being cities and civic life, knighthood has struggled to find a place in the world of communes and city-states, merchants and markets.
Organized Collective Violence in Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Tuscan Countryside: Some Case Studies from Central and North Eastern Tuscany
Violence is often thought of as a characteristic of all medieval societies. How such societies chose to exercise this violence is therefore a good, and understudied, way into understanding the basic rules about how they worked. Concentrating on twelfth and thirteenth century Tuscany, my intention is to show that a specific form of violence, namely organized collective violence, was not an option available to all social groups within the medieval rural society of northern Italy…
English Writings on Chivalry and Warfare during the Hundred Years War
Alongside 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
The 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
But 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
This 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
The 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.
Traditions of Courtly Love and the Canterbury Tales
Chaucer 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
The 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
To 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?
What 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
Throughout 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
David 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
In 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
Nevertheless 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
This 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
The 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.