“La Belle Dame Sans Merci?”: Gawain’s Knightly Identity and the Role of Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
It 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
While 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
I 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
William Marshal (c.1147-1219) is among the most extraordinary individuals in medieval English history.
Fayttes of Armes and of Chyvalrye
Malory’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
The 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
The 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.
False knights and true blood: reading the traitor’s body in Medieval England
From the late thirteenth century, traitors in England were subjected to spectacular rituals of public execution that could include drawing, hanging, disembowelling, beheading, quartering and bodily display.
Creativity, the trickster, and the cunning harper king: A study of the minstrel disguise entrance trick in “King Horn” and “Sir Orfeo”
What does a hero do when he finds himself in an impossible situation where customary tactics are useless; magic is not in the cards, and divine intervention unlikely? He could give up. Or he could use cunning. In both King Horn and Sir Orfeo, the hero wiggles out of just such a squeeze by using a minstrel disguise entrance trick—a sort of musical Trojan horse for which the enemy’s closely guarded gates swing open in welcome.
Figures of Female Militancy in Medieval France
These days when chivalry is everywhere on the decline, and no one dares to tourney anymore, and all knights are cowards, women are all the more courageous in battle.’
The Court of Beast and Bough: Contesting the Medieval English Forest in the Early Robin Hood Ballads
The medieval English forest has long been a space of contested legal meanings. After King William I first created the 75,000-acre New Forest, the English monarchy sought to define the vert, both legally and ideologically, as a multiplicity of sites in which the king’s rights were vigorously enforced.
“Mediterranean Falconry as a Cross-Cultural Bridge: Christian – Muslim Hunting Encounters”
Among the spectacular Eastern hunting techniques which could become the object of interest and envy of the Europeans, one easily adapted to the natural conditions of Europe was undoubtedly the falconry. In fact, it became not only a great fancy of medieval and renaissance Europe, but also a kind of cross-cultural bridge across ideological gaps.
Reading about Lancelot in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde
This book is the central one of Troilus and Criseyde’s five books, with the sexual union of Troilus with Criseyde forming the climax and turning-point of the entire plot-structure, condensed at the start of the work by Chaucer in the words “fro woe to wele and after out of joie.”
“Kan he speke wel of love?”: Luf talk and Chivalry
In my view, Criseyde’s inquiry about Troilus’s verbal skill in “luf talk” highlights more a problematic issue of Criseyde’s concern about a man’s “loves craft” than that of his class in society. As Chaucer’s narrator remarks in the proem of Book II (22-42), every human activity in love is governed by language conventions, expressive shortcuts that a community agrees to understand and honor…
Strategic Insights: The Battle of Crecy
This paper will explore and analyze strategic decision making by Edward III, King of England, and Philip VI, King of France, at the Battle of Crecy using the critical thinking model as a conceptual framework, in conjunction with egocentrism and sociocentrism as the two main cognitive frames of reference.
Tournament: Martial Training or Elaborate Game?
Had the arms, armour and tactics of the tournament become so removed from actual warfare that the tournament was no longer able to provide valuable martial training and experiences?
A Response to Anglo-Saxon Heroism and Fourteenth Century Chivalry: Ideals for the Warrior in the Writings of J.R.R. Tolkien
While the chivalric ideal has continued to appear in British literature, Anglo-Saxon heroism with its bond between lord and thane has largely dropped away. The writings of J.R.R. Tolkien provide the striking exception to this.
Chivalry, Adultery, Ambiguity: The Image of Tristan and Isolde in Medieval Art
Tristan and Isolde is an Arthurian legend, the origins of which predate Arthur’s Roundtable. Scholars generally agree that the story of Tristan and Isolde is Celtic in origin.
The Fate of the Warrior’s Soul: Crusading, Chivalry, and the Formation of English Knighthood
When and how did knights stop thinking they were going to hell?
The Winter Solstice Season and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Does the season of the dark and the increasing day correspond to our own journeys into the dark and a celebration of light with new understanding and strengthened connectedness? Perhaps there is more than a bit of Pluto symbolism in our activities of the winter solstice.
A Chivalrous Man is Not a Gentleman: A Look at Chivalry in the Age of Chaucer
The concept of knighthood began as a military strategy used to supply men to fight kings’ wars, but it gradually developed into the glamorized ideal of chivalry and became associated with virtuous behavior expected during times of both war and peace.