Search Results

This chapter discusses Mark Twain and his idea of romanticism. The most compelling reason to avoid romanticizing chivalry is that to take a view through rose-tinted lenses distorts and trivializes this force in early European history. By escaping romanticism, people can recognize the linkage between chivalry and major issues in medieval society, especially the issue of violence and public order. It argues that in the problem of public order the knights play an important role, and that the guides to their conduct that chivalry provided are in themselves complex and problematic.

This chapter turns from abstraction to the matter of fleshly bodies and traumatic representation. It shows how, long before 19th‐century discourses of shellshock, the Elizabethan theater represented the experience of battlefield injury as an occurrence so overwhelming that it could not readily be assimilated or even seen. The chapter explores the staging of repetitive images of trauma in The Trial of Chivalry, an anonymous drama that takes it pseudo‐historical plot from some episodes in Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Exploring the play's representation of injury, this chapter shows how the culture's gender politics enable a woman's disfigured face to become legible as a kind of stand‐in for a soldier's injuries.

While the kings of Aragon could use their speeches to enhance and develop a political mythology, their arguments could only retain credibility if they corresponded to their audiences' accepted ideologies. Thus the expression of royal power in the cortes represents an interesting compromise, or perhaps even conflict, between the political limitations imposed on the kings of Aragon and their ambitions for royal authority. Moreover, it is in this context, more than in any other, that the need for political argument, explanation, and apology is demonstrated: in justifying the king's own position as ruler. This chapter looks at kingship and propaganda in peace and war, along with chivalry, in Aragon during the medieval period.

Recent work on dating Hume’s manuscripts by M. A. Stewart, with further evidence adduced here, establishes the likelihood that Hume’s manuscript ‘An historical essay on chivalry and modern honour’ was written in 1732 or 1733. What can we learn from the chapter about the development of Hume’s ideas in ethics and religion at this time, six or seven years before the publication of his Treatise of human nature? Throughout the chapter Hume assumes Hutcheson’s theory that genuine virtue is natural, and that its perversion results from artifice. Both the chapter itself and Hume’s contemporary correspondence strongly suggest also, however, that he was beginning to be influenced by the sceptical philosophy of Bernard Mandeville which stresses the role of artifice in moral judgement. The overreaching principle developed in the early chapter appears to be applied also in Hume’s later writings on religion, where the scepticism of Mandeville and Bayle is explicit.

A clue to Burke's conception of the public sphere can be found in the theatricality of his rhetorical tropes. Unlike radicals such as Priestley, who defined the public sphere as the exercise of rational agency, Burke saw the public sphere of the ancient regime France and Britain as constituted by elaborate fictions that were a matter of public knowledge and consensus. Fictions such as chivalry beneficially blurred the distinctions between agency and passivity, domination and subordination and gave rise to a distinctively ironic, self-conscious strain of civic emotion. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as in other writings and speeches, Burke praised Britain's tradition of skillfully manipulating conventional deference. The practices of actors and theatrical audiences exemplify for Burke the type of emotional response that rests on voluntary complicity and the disavowal of knowledge.

There are novelists of contraction and expansion in the English fiction of the 20th century. During this time, some the novelists returned to the ideas of chivalry and used it as a theme in their works. Several features of novel-sequences are discussed in the chapter. It uses distinct techniques to captivate the attention of readers such as thematic repetition.

By way of a comparative context for the achievement of Cervantes, this chapter surveys his status in both Continental and Anglo-American criticism. It documents how the Wattian rise of the novel – a critical construct responsible for marginalizing Cervantes while canonizing Defoe – has been fiercely contested by scholars of the ancient novel. In addition to questioning the usefulness of the term ‘romance’, these scholars of antiquity are enriching the notions of Cervantes's Graeco-Latin subtexts, concealed or avowed.

This chapter contends that the concept of ‘la verdad de la historia’ or the truth of the history, which is thematic in Don Quixote, contains the essence of Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes' poetics of comic fiction. This novel has an ironic sense and a basic purpose of ridiculing the romances of chivalry for their solemn pretence of historical truth by offering a preposterous equivalent to it. This chapter also examines the irony in the literal and poetic truth in the novel.

Information on Hume's childhood education is lacking and his later retrospects on his mature development are sometimes unreliable. Entering Edinburgh University at ten years old, he studied Latin, Greek, two years of philosophy, and some mathematics. New evidence is provided here. He dispar-aged college philosophy, but learnt something from natural philosophy. Leaving college at fourteen, he expanded his literary and philosophical horizons, studying Stoicism and other ancient systems and the religious epistemologies of his day. How far he shared these explorations with friends is unclear. After suffering a nervous crisis at eighteen, and probably a religious crisis, Hume distanced himself from the ancients and sought a more experiential science of human nature that came to maturity in the Treatise. His ‘historical essay’ on chivalry shows this transition in progress. After he returned from France in 1737, Hume's biggest task was to complete the presentation of his moral theory, a project delayed by his introduction to Francis Hutcheson. By 1741, he had moved into political commentary, and towards political economy, ranging over historical evidence from classical to modern times. In reworking some aspects of his Treatise philosophy, he simplified his metaphysics without abandoning it. His Political Discourses completed the philosophical foundations for the History of England.

This chapter argues that medieval evidence on chivalry and order is filled with tension and contradiction. Elspeth Kennedy, Philippe de Beaumanoir, and Ramon Llull are among the authors of historical works that provide several pieces of evidence and interpretations of chivalry. The content of the romances, as read in their books, leads to the same conclusion. Anyone who has read thousands of pages of chivalric literature knows that either these texts were meant for men and women, or that woman of the medieval period could not get enough of combat and war, of the effects of sword strokes on armour and the human body, of the particulars of tenurial relationships, and of the tactical manoeuvres that lead to victory. This evidence suggests that the great body of chivalric literature was aimed at knights even more than at their ladies.

This chapter examines the tension between an undoubted knightly piety and the considerable force of knightly independence. Knightly lay piety involved a degree of practical lay independence. Chivalry took on the mantle of religion without fully accepting the directive role claimed by ecclesiastics. It absorbed religion for its own purposes. Knights did not only bow before clerical authority but they also absorbed the lessons and patterns for their loves urged by their brothers, sisters, and cousins bearing veils. The nature of their piety and the way in which it combined with their power in the world helps explain the strength of chivalry.

This chapter discusses the case of chivalry and English kingship, emphasizing their differences. It investigates the particularities of English political and social circumstances. Legal records show that the knightly violence so widespread in chivalric literature was practised in everyday life, with serious consequences for public order.