The Societal Role of Chivalry in Romance: Northwestern Europe

chapter 15 The Societal Role of Chivalry in Romance: Northwestern Europe

What did medieval people mean when they used the word “chivalry” (Latin, militia, French, chevalerie)? The simplest sense was hardy deeds in a fight with edged weapons. A second meaning was social, the body of knights in one place or even all knights, thought of as a distinct group. The third meaning, more abstract, referred to their ideas and ideals, to chivalry as the ethos of the knights. All three senses of the word appear (often intertwined) in romance literature, one of our best (if least used) sources on medieval society. Yet the historian reading romance in order to understand chivalry faces dif- ficult questions. Historians still believe that by careful use of evidence a “real” medieval world can be partially recovered; yet how can romance, which seems so totally “unreal,” form a part of this evidence? Some scholars have thought that since it is imaginative literature, romance must be discounted as merely escapist storytelling. Some have considered the chivalry portrayed in its pages dreamlike, a thin veil pulled over the realities of a harsh world,1 and completely divorced from grinding social tensions or violence. An audience limited by gender would further reduce the importance of romance as historical evidence by cutting readership in half – picturing men reading (or listening in hall to) chansons de geste with their endless war and tenurial disputes; women in chamber reading the more psychological romances with love interest. This chapter takes a different view on all these points. As Elspeth Kennedy has shown, knights in the very real world referred frequently and familiarly to these works of literature. A “two-way traffic” connected these men of war, law, and politics with Arthurian romance no less than chanson de geste.2 Many owned copies of these texts. Some, such as the father of the famous legist Philippe de Beaumanoir, even wrote romance themselves.3 Geoffroi de Charny,

* Previously published in Roberta Krueger (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge, 2000), 97–114. 1 Johan Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages, tr. Rodney J. Peyton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (University of Chicago Press, 1996). 2 Elspeth Kennedy, “The Knight as Reader of Arthurian Romance,” in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, ed. M.B. Shichtman and J.P. Carley (Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 1994). 3 Bernard Gicquel, “Le Jehan le Blond de Philippe de Rémi peut-il être une source du Willehalm von Orlens?” Romania, 102 (1981), 306–323.

The Societal Role Of Chivalry In Romance: Northwestern Europe 297 the leading French knight of the mid-fourteenth century and author of a didactic manual called The Book of Chivalry,4 apparently knew romances like the Lancelot do Lac5 and wrote of men who might love Queen Guenevere.6 In addition to borrowing from the imagery of the Ordene de chevalerie7 (another vernacular didactic manual), Ramon Llull, who wrote the most popular book on | chivalry in the Middle Ages, likewise drew heavily on thirteenth- 97 century prose romances.8 Moreover, the romances include enough of combat and war, of the detailed effects of sword strokes on armor and the human body beneath, of the particu- lars of feudal relationships, and of the tactical maneuvers that lead to victory, to lead us to conclude that these texts were meant for knights as well as ladies. Their conduct also shows that the literature is reaching knights, as students of chivalry have shown in case after case. Larry D. Benson’s examination of the tournament in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and in the biography of William Marshal, for example, concluded that we have on the tournament field an excellent case of the interplay of life and art impossible if knights were not deeply steeped in chivalric romance as well as chanson.9 Authors of historical accounts of the knights’ actions sense no gap between what they describe and accounts in imaginative literature; often they stress the links between the two. John Barbour (d. 1395) terms his chronicle of Robert Bruce a “romanys.”10 Both Barbour and Sir Thomas Gray assure us that if all the deeds of Edward Bruce in Ireland were set down they would make a fine romance.11 Other active knights shared the sentiment. Robert Bruce often told “auld storys” to his men in trying times, to buck them up. According to his

4 Printed in Richard W. Kaeuper and Elspeth Kennedy, The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny: Text, Context and Translation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). 5 Elspeth Kennedy, ed., Lancelot do Lac (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Corin Corley, tr., Lancelot of the Lake (Oxford University Press, 1989). 6 Kaeuper and Kennedy, The Book of Chivalry, 118–119. 7 Keith Busby, ed., Raoul de Hodenc, Le roman des eles. The Anonymous Ordene de chevalerie (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1983). 8 Alfred T.P. Byles, tr., The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry (London, 1926). 9 “The Tournament in the Romances of Chrétien de Troyes and L’Histoire de Guillaume Le Maréchal,” in Larry D. Benson, John Leyerle, eds., Chivalric Literature (University of Toronto Press, 1989), 1–24. Cf. Richard Barber and Juliet Barker, Tournaments, Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages (New York: Wiedenfield, 1989). 10 McDiarmid and Stevenson, eds., Barbour’s Bruce, 3 vols. sts (Edinburgh, 1980–85), 1. 446. 11 Sir Herbert Maxwell, tr., Scalacronica: The Reigns of Edward I, Edward ii, and Edward iii as recorded by Sir Thomas Gray (Glasgow, Madehose, 1907), 57.