chivalric lifestyle was an essential element in providing the necessary pool of personnel.
What had changed was the attitude toward depredations by undisciplined warriors. In the
15th century, such brigandage was a felonious infringement of the king’s monopoly in
matters of war and peace. Three centuries earlier, when that monopoly was
inconceivable, undisciplined violence by troops drew criticism for violating the Christian
knight’s obligations toward noncombatants.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
[See also: LAY ORDERS OF CHIVALRY; NOBILITY; PEACE OF GOD;
TREASON; WARFARE]
Duby, Georges. “Dans la France du Nord-Ouest. Au XIIe siècle: les ‘jeunes’ dans la société
aristocratique.” Annales, Économies-Sociétés-Civilisations 19 (1964):835–46.
Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in
France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries, trans. F.Hopman. London:
Arnold, 1924.
Keen, Maurice. Chivalry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. [Extensive bibliography.]
——. The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965.
Painter, Sidney. French Chivalry: Chivalric Ideas and Practices. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1940.
Vale, Malcolm. War and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France, and
Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages. London: Duckworth, 1981.
CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES
(fl. 1165–91). Although Chrétien wrote lyric poetry in the troubadour and trouvère
traditions, he is known principally for his Arthurian romances, where he appears to have
treated for the first time, in French at least, the chivalric quest, the love of Lancelot and
Guenevere, and the Grail as a sacred object. He also emphasized the problematic side of
the love of Tristan and Iseut and may have contributed to the spread of this legend in
French in an early work that is lost today.
Although the chronology of his writings is uncertain, the order of composition of his
major romances seems to be as follows: Erec et Enide, Cligés, Le chevalier de la
charrette (Lancelot), Yvain (Le chevalier au lion), and Le conte du graal (Perceval). He
may also have written Philomena, an adaptation of the Ovidian story of Philomela
(Metamorphoses 6.426–74), and Guillaume d’Angleterre, a saint’s life told like an
adventure romance. The prologue to Cligés refers to works Chrétien wrote in his early
years: Philomena (“de la hupe et de l’aronde”) and another, lost, on the tale of Pelops
(“de la mors de l’espaule”), as well as French versions of Ovid’s Ars amatoria and
Remedia amoris, and a Tristan story, concerning which, curiously, Chrétien does not
mention Tristan himself: “del roi Marc et d’Iseut la blonde.” He is also the author of two
courtly chansons in the trouvère tradition.
Chrétien names as patrons Marie de Champagne, the first daughter of Eleanor of
Aquitaine and Louis VII of France, who, he writes, gave him the matiere and san for the
Charrette, and Philippe d’Alsace, count of Flanders, who gave him “the book” for the
Conte du graal. Philippe died in the Holy Land in 1191, which may explain why the
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