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This chapter examines the depiction of the rural landscape in William Shakespeare's romances. It suggests that Shakespeare's wilderness, deserts, fields, and caves show a world both beyond and in competition with courtly life. The countryside also performed the dual task of recapitulating the problems of the centre and evoking a place over which a traditional courtliness has little control. This chapter contends that Shakespeare's romances also contributed to the re-emergence of the pastoral-cum-georgic milieu as a locus for political criticism.

This chapter covers a range of biblical narratives and looks particularly at the challenges faced by narrators when engaging with the figure of John. The first section considers narratives based on the Gospels, paying particular attention to Der saelden hort, a verse romance drawing partly on the tradition that John and Mary Magdalene were to have been married at the wedding in Cana. It is argued that the narrator's perspective on the figure of John provides a key to understanding this work's almost experimental deployment of different narrative styles (veering from mystical/ascetic to courtly) and the narrator's stated ambition of out-performing the classical courtly authors of the past. The chapter also argues that narrators of texts which recount the contents of the Apocalypse consistently seek to usurp the authority of John's narrative voice and to appropriate to themselves his visionary experiences.

The dialectic between courtly and anti-courtly ideologies is a historical constant in the early Italian tradition: it is present not only in Dante, but in poets before Dante, like Guittone d'Arezzo, and it is a major feature of Boccaccio's work as well. For this reason, the ideological shifts manifested by these authors lend themselves to the construction of a historical overview of gender in this tradition, allowing us to frame a gendered history of early Italian literature in terms of the dialectic between a courtly ideology and a competing set of values. Courtliness, the set of values associated with what Dante and his peers call cortesia, is by definition a gendered issue, since its logic is constructed around a male/female binary.

Chapter four considers the celebrated opening fitt of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, suggesting how its rich depiction of conduct at King Arthur’s court serves to exemplify and interrogate contemporary courtly values and the power of courtesy in the face of apparently external threat. In so doing it challenges a number of recent interpretations of who or what The Green Knight represents, and offers a broadly positive account of Gawain’s performance at Camelot, and later at Hautdesert.

Between the mid-fourteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, when Delhi’s power shrank to that of a regional kingdom, a number of chieftains rose to power as rulers of small kingdoms and lineages. Such rulers and military entrepreneurs attempted to join the political elite by patronizing poets and performers whose compositions, in turn, reflect the values and contexts of their patrons. The chapter sees the romance and narrative genre popularized by texts such as the Candāyan, the Chitāī-carita, and the Padmāvat as evidence of the entrepreneurial politics of groups who are otherwise missing from the historiography of the period.

Chapter 3 shows how laughter became both a strategy for survival and a means for covert communication in the tense political environment of Henry II’s court. Contemporary writers described how public laughter worked as a potent weapon for shaming courtly rivals. As anxieties about mockery reached a new peak, public derision regularly destroyed careers and reputations. Laughter also became valued as a means of subtle communication, and as a way of exposing the hidden codes and power relationships of court life. As this chapter argues, laughter became so highly valued at Henry’s court because it allowed courtiers to appeal to a reason and dialogue that was otherwise beyond the restrictions of explicit discourse. Evading the culture of rigid procedure that was defining the operation of Angevin government, Henry’s courtiers were able to translate laughter’s growing conceptual and imagined power into a hard-edged, socially coercive political practice.

The Introduction discusses how, towards the end of the twelfth century, enigmatically powerful images of laughing kings and saints began to appear in texts circulating at the English royal court. At the same time, contemporaries began to celebrate the humor, wit, and laughter of King Henry II (r.1154–89), and his martyred archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Thomas Becket (d.1170). This introductory chapter briefly explores the potential intellectual, literary, social, religious, and political roots for these images, outlining the framework of the book as a whole. Along with a critical overview of existing scholarship on medieval humor, the politics and government of Henry II, and the sainthood of Thomas Becket, the chapter indicates for the reader how a study of the relationship between laughter and power may have implications for how we understand the political and religious reforms of the twelfth century more generally.

This chapter begins by considering the scattered writings produced in the decades following the Norman Conquest, and the role of their accounts of miracles and visions in re-creating a sense of English identity. It then returns to the reign of Cnut, to argue that his establishment of his rule as an ‘English’ king resolved the ideological impasse of Æthelred’s disastrous reign. Looking at the role of the Church in this crisis, it then considers the origins of the new theology of interiority and confession, and of the roots of affective piety. Turning back to kingship, it describes the patterns set in English government after the Norman Conquest, and turns toward the celebration of new secular and courtly ideals.

This chapter considers the literary representation of love in both religious and secular texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It discusses the ‘sexuality’ of religious devotion, and the emergence of the love-plot in the romance as a figure for both social and economic success. It considers the differing representations of love inherited from classical authors, and developed by contemporaries into different narrative patterns. It discusses the role of privacy as a concept that enables a reorganization of social mores. Thomas of Britain’s Tristan receives extended analysis, alongside a comparison with Richard of Saint-Victor’s Four Degrees of Violent Love.

Inspired by the desire to win the love of his lady, the Squire has fought in the Hundred Years War, perhaps on the earl of Buckingham’s expedition to Flanders, Artois, and Picardy of 1380. He is often seen as presenting an unfavourable contrast with his father, the crusading Knight. It is true that the Squire has not had the time or the opportunity to build a chivalric reputation, and therefore has not acquired the admirable experience and prudence of his father. Yet the Squire remains an engaging and sympathetic figure, and a positive example of aristocratic youth. While contemporary moralists condemned frivolity, lechery, and rashness on the part of such young men, the Squire is said to be genuinely courteous, a loyal servant to his father, and a brave man who has taken up arms and proved himself in war, demonstrating that his courtliness has not degenerated into decadence.

This chapter explores the role of touch in The Faerie Queene. Spenser seemingly warns against the dangerous ‘feeling pleasures’ of touch in his allegory of the human body in the Book of Temperance, but the treatment of moments of contact elsewhere in the poem suggests something more complex than a simple repudiation of touch on Aristotelian or Neoplatonic terms. It is suggested that Spenser drew upon the unstable and crucial role of touch in his cultural and political milieu, as well as longstanding debates surrounding the allegorical reading of the scriptures, in order to make moments of intimacy in his poem inescapably open to interpretation, including slanderous misconstrual. His allegory also includes moments of fleeting and intimate contact, which escape strictures against improper touch, and perhaps escape the requirement to mean something altogether.

The final chapter and conclusion of the book validates the Enlightenment idea of chivalric knighthood—a shared explanation of superior behaviour which emerged into the full consciousness of medieval people around the beginning of the thirteenth century, but places it in a new context, as superseding an earlier shared explanation of superior conduct, weakened by the internal contradictions of courtly culture. It places the nexus point between societies as the Angevin-Flemish courts of the 1170s and 1180s, where knighthood was exalted as the mainspring of their princes’ social prestige. Consideration is given to non-cultural reasons for the weakness of Courtliness, particularly princely aggression against their aristocracies.

Superior conduct before the chivalric turn was defined across Europe as something called Courtliness (Lat. curialitas, Fr. courtoisie, Occ./It. cortesia, MHG Hofzuht). Using the early twelfth-century literature of Occitania and England, the chapter establishes it to be then well understood amongst the laity and taught across Europe in elite households (not just those of kings and princes) and considers how far back such lay conduct fit for the court might be found. A case can be made that it was already a pan-European phenomenon by 1000, which partly explains how it was so widespread by 1100. The chapter argues, in contradiction to earlier work, that it was a habitus generated within the aristocracy and taught to youth within its halls, not devised by a civilizing Church from classical models.

Medieval society had ways of reinforcing social boundaries. Cortoisie as superior conduct was further defined by the literary concept of Vilonie, its dark opposite. The character of the ‘villain’ was a teaching aid designed to stigmatize people whose behaviour conflicted with the habitus. Unfortunately for the agricultural labourer, the same word became the usual term for a peasant, a grim irony which added to the developing exclusivity of the noble classes and their courtly environment. It was deployed to curb the social rise of the rich bourgeoisie, perceived as a threat to the courtly habitus in the later twelfth century.