![]() ![]() The intellectual apparatus developed to scrutinize structures of oppression, however, has not been matched by equally acute methods of understanding cultural structures that facilitate human flourishing. Our modern culture of critique excels at puncturing idealizations and unmasking hypocrites. Some knights will protect a prisoner of war or a woman alone on the road, even when there are no other incentives for doing so, simply because “that’s what knights do.” Others will kill the prisoner or rape the woman, expecting to get off scot-free because “of course knights don’t do things like that.” Both potentialities deserve our attention. The problem of chivalry is but one instance of a deeper question about culture: is it beneficial for people to profess higher standards than they actually attain? Do lofty ideals improve flawed people’s behavior, nudging them to live up to-or at least closer to-a standard they would not otherwise have attempted? Or do idealized representations disguise evil, upholding a corrupt status quo and persuading the oppressed to remain complacent and complicit? Surely the answer must be both. do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace them by force.” If a chaplain could write such advice under the patronage of a princess, powerful men’s actual conduct toward vulnerable women must have been evil indeed. Regarding peasants, Andreas Capellanus writes in his influential twelfth-century treatise The Art of Courtly Love, “if you should, by some chance, fall in love with some of their women. ![]() Knights’ exaggerated deference to ladies only applied to women of elevated social standing. The attitude of many knights may be summed up in the motto of fourteenth-century Breton lord Olivier de Clisson: pour ce qu’il me plest (because I like it). His relish for war is unapologetic, celebrating violence rather than excusing it as a means to nobler ends. In one lyric, he lists things that please him on a spring day: flowers and birdsong, horses in bright array, refugees fleeing, knights “splitting heads and hacking arms,” corpses in ditches. We can catch a glimpse of the darker side of knighthood in the poems of twelfth-century troubadour Bertran de Born, who writes rather more passionately about battle than love. Even within this limited scope of application, medieval knights notoriously failed to live up to their professed standards. It primarily governed their relationships with one another, not lower classes a vanquished knight might be spared (and exchanged for valuable ransom) where a foot-soldier was struck down without a second thought. It applied even in theory only to the noble class, a tiny fraction of the population. The medieval chivalric code had definite limits. Today, amid an avalanche of evidence about powerful men’s abuses from the casting couch to the police chokehold, it’s easy to see the holes and hypocrisies in such ideals. The ideal knight was supposed to combine violence and meekness, ferocity and mercy, in perfect proportions, “a lion in field and a lamb in hall.” His exercise of power was justified by his service to those who lacked it-women, noncombatants, the defeated. What connects these standards of conduct is a paradoxical relationship between strength and weakness. Also, that no man take no battles in a wrongful quarrel for no law, ne for no world’s goods.” While chivalry might now be most strongly associated with deference to women, medieval knights were more concerned with the honor that guaranteed verbal agreements between political agents and forbade crimes against humanity by military men with little oversight. and always to do ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen succor upon pain of death. It’s a lovely idea, summed up well in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur by the Pentecostal Oath sworn by the knights of the Round Table: “never to do outrageousity nor murder, and always to flee treason also, by no mean to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asketh mercy. ![]() ![]() It’s easy to dismiss chivalry as the stuff of romance, belonging to the Middle Ages’ popular adventure stories, not the actual conduct of its governors and soldiers. ![]()
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