of redefi ning the past, as well as a way of criticizing
contemporary morals and behavior.
As used in poems, chivalry can be both defi ning and
distracting. At times, the rituals of chivalry seem to be
little more than plot devices: All the ritual of the
knighting (or “dubbing”) ceremonies, such as confes-
sion and vigil, bathing and robing, girding with a
sword, and the swearing of vows, are used to drive the
narrative along and provide solemn breaks in the
action, a way of resting between battles. Yet these ritu-
als also help to defi ne the characters and establish the
parameters of their potential actions within the narra-
tive, in that they defi ne who the characters are and
who they are supposed to be in terms of class and
background.
The culture of chivalry, like the word itself, has its
origins in France, and many English chivalric texts
were translations or adaptations of French works.
Although designed for secular entertainment, these
poems were still viewed by the nobility as prescriptive
texts on behavior and morality. The fi rst romances in
England appeared after the NORMAN CONQUEST and
were a product of the newly formed ANGLO-NORMAN
culture. Some of the earliest were versions of the chan-
sons de geste (songs of great deeds) of Charlemagne and
were written in French for the French-speaking Anglo-
Norman nobility now ruling England. However, the
Anglo-Norman versions and their later English redac-
tions were more than mere copies. By the 13th cen-
tury, native Middle English romances began appearing,
such as Richard Coeur de Lion (ca. 1290), which por-
trays the king as a celebrated English hero.
The Crusades provided much of the backdrop for
these romances. While in reality the Crusades were an
outpouring of religiously motivated carnage and politi-
cal greed, in literature they became the defi ning period
of chivalrous behavior, when the knightly warrior put
his military training to the noble purpose of purging
the Holy Land of infi dels. The tropes of crusading lit-
erature—vows; rescuing, wooing, and leaving behind
of comely maidens; voyage and pilgrimage; defending
Christian pilgrims from infi del brutality; delivering
Jerusalem; miraculous victories and martyr-like
defeats—became staples of chivalric literature. Even
classical material was refashioned into chivalrous tales;
GEOFFREY CHAUCER’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1381)
expands upon its Continental sources to depict Troilus
as a chivalrous knight trying to protect his lady.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in ARTHURIAN LIT-
ERATURE, in which knights go forth on quests that resem-
ble crusades and encounter numerous opportunities to
display their chivalrous natures and boundless bravery.
Gawain was one of the most popular of the chivalrous
heroes, and in the 15th century there was a veritable
cottage industry now called the Gawain cycle—The
Turke and Gowin, The Marriage of Sir Gawaine, and The
Grene Knight, to name a few.
Perhaps no English work of the later Middle Ages
encapsulates the concept of chivalry as much as Sir
Thomas Malory’s prose epic Morte d’Arthur (1469).
Malory drew on several traditional renderings of the
Arthurian material, such as the alliterative Morte Arth-
ure, c. 1400. In a single text he manages to create a
chivalrous world in which knights and their class act
according to the ideals of noble behavior; yet at the
same time, Malory is writing a lament for a culture that
had, by then, already ceased to be. Elements of chiv-
alry that are found in Malory include the quest, combat
between knights, pilgrimage, the rescuing of women
and the weak, loyalty to lord and fellow knights, acts
of generosity, and vigorous battle scenes.
Roughly contemporary with Malory, Sir John
Writhe’s Garter Book (ca. 1488) and WILLIAM CAXTON’s
English translation of Ramon Lull’s Book of the Ordre of
Chyvalry, two popular handbooks to chivalry. Unfor-
tunately, by the time these texts appeared in English,
real military and social behavior had long left chivalry
behind. Chivalrous handbooks such as this, which
were original to England, or copies of earlier military
texts (such as Vegetius’s De Re Militari, which was
translated into English in the 15th century) were pop-
ular for the same reasons Malory was: They looked
back to a more idyllic time that never was, yet seemed
so recent.
Chivalric romances continued to be popular in the
Renaissance, as evidenced by the 1485 printing of Mal-
ory’s Morte d’Arthur, which was reprinted by WYNKYN
DE WORDE and RICHARD PYNSON in the late 15th and
early 16th centuries. Renaissance poets were slightly
apologetic about their interest in the romances: For allCHIVALRY 115