![]() In their most famous works, “ The Canterbury Tales” and “ Le Morte d’Arthur,” respectively, they wrote about women sentencing rapist knights to death or reeducation. Such popular tales of chivalry pressured aristocrats to adopt the chivalric code – to some extent.īy the later 14th and mid-15th centuries, English writers like Geoffrey Chaucer and Sir Thomas Malory depict the court of King Arthur as a bastion of justice for women, well beyond the norms of that day. A few decades later, the French poet Chrétien de Troyes portrays Sir Lancelot casting aside reputation, glory and treasured warhorses to save the kidnapped Queen Guinevere. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “ History of the Kings of Britain” of 1138, King Arthur kills the rapist giant of Mont-Saint-Michel. Their adoption of chivalry as a professional code of honor allowed some of them to achieve respect as gentlemen.Įuropean literature soon featured knights and kings as protectors of women. Deborah even reproaches Sisera’s mother for raising her son to plunder and enslave women as “spoils of war.”Įarly medieval knights were essentially hired thugs of low social status. ![]() In her visionary song she praises Jael, the lone woman who assassinates a predatory enemy general on the run. The prophetess Deborah, for example, accompanies an army into battle. The Bible also features warrior women who emerge as chivalric figures. It inspired the international law that nations are governed by today. that require protections for captive women, peace overtures to enemies and prohibitions against destroying fruit trees. Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the the Hebrew Bible, outlined laws of war around the 7th century B.C. Jewish laws also influenced the chivalric customs of medieval leaders. Enkidu defeats Gilgamesh in hand-to-hand combat to end his custom of sleeping with every bride in his city on her wedding night, and wins that king’s friendship. In it, the wild man Enkidu, civilized by a woman, confronts the sexually abusive king Gilgamesh. in “Gilgamesh,” perhaps the oldest surviving epic poem. The earliest chivalric incident I teach appears around 2100 B.C. Across many cultures it arises to protect society’s most vulnerable. Rather than fostering misogynistic attitudes or overprotective behaviors that insult women, chivalry has been a liberating force from ancient times onward. An impossible task.As a historian of literature who studies chivalry, I stand with the latter group. The knight must carefully navigate the pitfalls and paradoxes of his honorable and weighty burden for God, lord, and country all while being held to a higher physical, religious, and social standard than others. The eyes of all the estates are on the knights, each with their own idea of what honor, prowess, largesse, gentilesse, and courtesy look like. The weight of chivalric burden comes from society, but does not limit itself to stringent social expectations. ![]() The century, the authors, and the audience may change, but the burden remains the same. Regardless of chivalric burden’s impact on the knights in medieval romance, lais, manuals, and biography, the idealized code of chivalry staunchly remains in our twenty-first-century conceptions of masculinity. They develop a system of triage in which oaths are fulfilled by order of perceived importance they alleviate their personal burdens through the creation of brotherhood oaths-effectively reallocating burden amongst themselves, and they often reciprocate unattainable idealism with violence and monstrous behavior. In order to combat the burden of chivalry, most knights, fictional or historical, create a code of their own-one based not upon physical, religious, or social idealism, but instead upon the realities of their experiences. The medieval knight then appears in medieval texts as both the paragon of chivalric perfection and the exempla of perpetual failure. The immediate result of this chivalric burden is the inability of knights to live up to the chivalric code’s exacting physical standards, entropic ecclesiastical expectations, and social obligations. Greene (Creator) Institution The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG ) Web Site: Advisor Amy VinesĪbstract: This dissertation argues that the chivalric code and resulting “ethos” of chivalry creates a physical, religious, and social burden upon the medieval knights tasked with its application and adherence. ![]() Bearing the weight of honor: knightly navigation of chivalry’s physical, religious, and social burden UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document) Corrie W.
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