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Chivalry (Paperback)
Loot Price: R472
Discovery Miles 4 720
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Chivalry (Paperback)
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List price R522
Loot Price R472
Discovery Miles 4 720
You Save R50 (10%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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In this book Maurice Keen examines the significance of chivalry as
a secular social ideal in the period from c. 1100 to c. 1500, and
finds that historians have exaggerated both chivalry's early
Christian dedication and its later secular decadence, and that it
may be better described as an ethos in which martial, aristocratic
and Christian elements were fused together. Keen first discusses
the secular origins of chivalry and stresses the importance of the
development of new cavalry tactics in the late eleventh century,
which set apart the knights - mounted warriors - as a separate and
privileged group. The launching of the crusades sharpened existing
ideas about their Christian role at about the same time, and
rituals for making new knights gave definition to chivalry as an
aristocratic order. The appearance in the twelfth century of a
secular literature of knighthood did something more, endowing
chivalry with an historical mythology of its own. The stories of
Charlemagne and Arthur furnished a store of prestigious models of
chivalrous values in action. the ideals of knighthood could be
symbolically expressed, and the heralds, as experts in its history,
literature and rituals, became a kind of secular priesthood of
chivalry. Their learning helped to render the chivalry of the late
middle ages ornate and often extravagant - a development which has
led many historians to categorise it as decadent. Keen argues,
however, that the attention lavished on externals in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, and exemplified in the pageantry of
tournaments and the ceremonials of such famous secular orders of
chivalry as the Garter and the Golden Fleece, was not just empty
show: it was rather an attempt to give expression, in a vivid and
evocative manner, to the values and virtues of chivalry. The cult
of honour, which seeks to give merit and loyal service their due
reward in reputation and social respect, was at the heart of the
chivalric ideal. high status and a privileged way of life impose
was the most important legacy of chivalry to later times, and it
had a profound influence in consequence on the political mentality
of the aristocracies of early modern Europe.
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