Chivalry, the martial ethos of knighthood, with its emphasis on honour and prowess, shaped contemporary perceptions of the proper conduct of war; and war – properly conducted – was a key component of medieval kingship. Writing during Edward II’s reign, the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi quoted a letter sent to the king’s confessor: ‘a king is so styled from the fact of ruling, as one who should rule his people with laws and defend them with his sword from their enemies’. This summed up a commonplace view of kingship, a duality reflected in the iconography of the kings of England: since the reign of William the Conqueror, the Great Seal had depicted the king enthroned in majesty on the front; and on the reverse, armed, mounted on a charging warhorse, wielding a sword – the very image of chivalric knighthood.

In the twelfth century AD, European elite warriors, knights, finding themselves in dire straits during battle, adopted the practice of surrendering themselves to adversaries who then guaranteed the safety of their prisoners. In turn, prisoners promised to pay a ransom to their captors, payment of which would free the prisoners and allow them to take up arms again. This practical transaction was considered honorable, even praiseworthy. Because ransoms could be substantial, it might be necessary for a prisoner to return to his lands to collect the funds. To do so, he would swear on his word of honor, parole d’honneur, to return with the required funds. The practices of honorable surrender, ransom, and parole were established in customary laws of war, and disputes between captors and their captives could be appealed to courts of honor. There were circumstances in which honorable surrender was not permitted. For example, military commanders could forbid their forces to accept surrenders until a battle was decided, lest their men disperse during battle to collect prisoners and ransoms. The recourse to honorable surrender was limited to the elites; common soldiers could be overwhelmed or killed outright in battle or siege.

The iconic image of the knight on horseback represents just one facet of the horse’s imprint on legal, political, and social systems developing in medieval Iberian society. This chapter argues that historical and bodily relations with horses shaped the negotiation of social status and the administration of territory during the dynamic periods of peace, conflict, and negotiation among Iberian kingdoms in the tenth to fifteenth centuries. Defining the set of practices, ideals, and institutional hierarchies making up an Iberian "culture of the horse” brings to light a fundamental tension in which the horse served as both an agent of control and a means to disrupt power relations.

Chapter two analyses world views, conceptions of time and practices of war from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This chapter provides a comparison and contrast with the time after 1650 and after 1800. Medieval world views emphasized certainty and predictability since everything was a part of Divine Providence and history proceeded along a given trajectory towards the return of Christ. However, there was considerable room for human agency that brought about change in the world. Without a free will, there would be neither sin nor grace. Contemporaries created rules and norms to make war more predictable and to hem in the workings of chance. During the Renaissance, thinking about predictability and the limits of human control advanced dramatically. Humanists used terms like Fortuna, Virtù and Decorum to conceptualize chance, human capability and the necessity of adapting to circumstances. The Protestant reformers argued that the world is essentially predetermined by God and humans have no freedom of choice. Paradoxically, this world view galvanized Protestants to political and strategic action in England, France, Germany and Scandinavia.

This essay considers the influence and reception of the writings of Christine de Pizan, whose career was caught up in the Anglo-French conflict of the Hundred Yearsߣ War, as illustrated by her LߣEpistre dߣOthéa, a didactic treatise on chivalry and virtue, and her autobiographical LߣAdvision Christine. Warren explores the shifting significance of the Othéa during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, showing that Stephen Scropeߣs English translation reduced female agency and power, changes that reflected wider cultural anxieties concerning female lineage and virtue in the context of Lancastrian claims to the throne. The essay also explores Christineߣs connections to two other powerful women: Joan of Arc and Margaret of Anjou. By reworking Christineߣs treatments of women to reduce their political power and independent wisdom, translators of Christineߣs works also contained the political threats represented by powerful women. Strikingly, depictions of Christine as author shift her context from the court to the cloister, reaffirming traditionally gendered views of women even while her works continued to be circulated in England.

This chapter examines the reception of romance in medieval Italy, focusing on the way in which Italian writers engaged with the form and content of the genre. It examines different modes of adaptation through the lens of three texts from different Italian-speaking communities and time periods. Firstly, the Franco-Venetian Prophecies de Merlin demonstrates the hybrid character of Italian romance, which combines French and Italian language and perspectives – in this case, to incorporate Italian interests in political prophecy into the Arthurian story. The Tuscan Tavola Ritonda characterizses Italian-vernacular adaptations of French prose cycles, combining ideals of chivalric heroism with civic values to resignify Tristan’s status as the perfect knight. Finally, the late medieval Ferrarese L’Inamoramento de Orlando by Matteo Maria Boiardo draws on the Italian cantari in its incorporation of romance themes and forms alongside chanson de geste. Italian medieval romance emerges as a malleable and porous genre that is always in dialogue with other genres and cultural perspectives.

It is difficult to reconstruct and analyze the relationship between romances and their historical contexts, especially because of the power of modern myths about chivalry. There was no single age of chivalry that stretched from the eleventh or twelfth centuries to the fifteenth century and beyond, and there was no single code or ideal for how aristocrats should behave during that period. Societies and cultures inevitably changed over time, and there were important geographical variations across the different regions, lands, and linguistic contexts that today form Western Europe. Therefore, medieval romances must be considered against the specific historical contexts in which they were produced and read. This chapter focuses on examples and case studies drawn from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France and England, a period that has often been dismissed as one of chivalric decline. Yet radical changes in warfare, aristocratic class, and identity, as well as lay literacy and engagement with book ownership and writing created a dynamic context for the production and consumption of chivalric texts of all kinds.

Medieval romance, from the perspective of critical race studies (CRS), justifies medieval imperial expansion. Medieval romances frame themselves as celebrating the culture of elite knights and ladies by imagining their borders as inhabited by dangerous people who must be defeated and eliminated, with the result that enemy territories are subsumed into the territories of the elite knight. From this viewpoint, medieval romance uses chivalry to define who is accepted within the boundaries and who is left out of that formation. By studying differing patters of dehumanization in medieval romance with a focus on Old French and Middle Welsh texts, the chapter shows some examples of the ways that the genre of romance makes race and of how the repercussions of making race further systems of oppression. The chapter’s aims, then, are to use CRS to show a possible form of analyzing race in medieval romance.

This chapter investigates British sack atrocities to civilians during the Napoleonic era. It analyses how British soldiers represented this violence in their memoirs, especially through the lens of sensationalist gothic horror; and the challenges of estimating the scale of atrocities. It adopts a multi-contextual and multi-causal framework for understanding these atrocities, from situational rage and the brutalising experiences of war to the cultural and political contexts in which sack violence could operate. Whilst most British soldiers participated in the plundering of stormed towns, the murder and rape of civilians during sacks was perpetrated by only a minority. Across soldiers’ writings, we find horror, shame, and moral outrage at such acts; empathy towards the suffering civilian; and a moral duty to bear witness. And despite lamenting the inevitability of such atrocities, this did not prevent individuals, especially officers, from intervening to protect civilians, especially women, acts framed by chivalric and humanitarian ideals.

Chapter 1 shows how stationers’ strategies directed the publication of early commercial history plays and the reputation of early playing troupes. It concentrates on printer-publisher Thomas Creede and argues that his publishing strategies helped to create a print identity for Queen Elizabeth’s Men as a company that promoted Protestant and Tudor sympathies. While previous studies have tended to assume a correlation between performance and print repertories, this chapter argues that the company’s reputation for specializing in history plays could be a consequence of the publication process. Through a contrastive analysis of his non-dramatic output alongside plays such as The True Tragedy of Richard III, Selimus, and The Famous Victories of Henry V, this chapter suggests that, for Creede, the purpose of ‘history’ (broadly conceived) was to provide exemplary and counter-exemplary models for readers, that could be used to promote England’s and Elizabeth I’s interests. Looking beyond Creede’s output, this chapter argues that the history play occupied a central position in the development of a market for commercial playbooks – especially during a pivotal year, 1594.

The second chapter considers the use of chivalric romance tropes in Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, an Armenian. Written in English by himself (1792). In Emin’s letters to his Bluestocking patronesses Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Catherine Talbot, he plays a humble knight errant or “Persian Slave” as a strategy to master British politeness. In doing so, he befriends patrons such as George Lyttleton, Edmund Burke, and William Augustus Duke of Cumberland, the youngest son of King George II and commander of a German army Emin had joined in 1757. His epistolary interaction with the Bluestockings who coproduced his romantic fantasies allows him to identify Persian-Islamic notions of chivalry with British liberty. His memoir records ironic episodes in which he affiliates with brotherly Muslim warriors during his Islamophobic quest to liberate his people in the Caucasus from Ottoman and Persian despots. Such affinities render him a patriotic English gentleman while his lady friends expand their civic roles by adopting cosmopolitan identities, an exchange that compensates for a British manhood scarred by military failures during the Seven Years’ War.

The defining feature of Western warfare in this period was knighthood. This was not because horseback warfare was in any way new in the Frankish lands, or even because the technology of the equipment and use of cavalry had changed in any radical sense, though it is generally assumed that the stirrup appeared as a feature of cavalry equipment at some time in the ninth or tenth century, thus allowing the saddle to become a more effective fighting platform. But the stirrup did not by any means create the knight. What the knight represented was a new social phenomenon which grew progressively more important as generations passed and read new meanings into the status and potential of knighthood.

Drawing on both Statius’s Thebaid and Boccaccio’s Teseida, The Knight’s Tale uncomfortably sutures the horrors of epic tragedy to the idealism of chivalric romance, inflecting both with the philosophical ambitions of Boethius’s Consolation. This chapter traces the modern engagement with the tale as a history of attempts to understand the tensions produced by its multiple sources, genres, and rhetorical registers, and explores how accounts of its form inflect and are inflected by accounts of its politics. Politics here, as in other Canterbury Tales, is as much a matter of gender and sexuality as it is of class, rule, and social order. Moreover, the problems posed by aesthetic and political form become problems of how to understand the relations among the text, its pilgrim narrator, and the author. Beginning with the high formalist moment of postwar criticism, the chapter follows the development of ideology critique and of feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, each of which remains attuned to earlier formalist questions. The Knight’s Tale that emerges from this history is a text of great aesthetic ambition, whose aims are as much reflected in its incoherences as in its formalist impulses.

This chapter analyzes how the empire of the Great Mughals worked on the ground, beginning by dismissing the widespread idea that it was more powerful than its medieval predecessors because it adopted artillery and gunpowder weapons. Cavalry and horsemanship, not artillery or infantry, remained its chief military asset. Moreover, methods of cavalry warfare were disseminated to segments of Indian society previously dominated by infantry. As a result, a culture of chivalry prevailed. This was a culture of a horse-riding nobility, both Muslim and Hindu, and of institutionalized dissidence and privilege that developed under conditions of growth and the monetization of the economy that accompanied the expansion of world trade and the influx of American and Japanese silver through the sea trade. If the constitution of the Mughal empire was thus grounded in Turko-Mongol customary law, this chapter goes on to show that the entire system of Mughal governance and the administration of justice broadly evolved within the same matrix of customary law, not the canonical or prescriptive texts of the Sharia.

This chapter focuses on Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), published during the early years of Britain’s war in America. It discusses how Reeve responded to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), not only by rejecting the extravagance of his work but also by situating her tale in fifteenth-century England. Attempting to recover the political significance of this decision in the context of the American war, it considers the way in which the novel offers an allusive narrative of national reconciliation and repair. Even as Reeve claimed that her ‘picture of Gothic times and manners’ served the improving purposes of ‘Romance’, however, her work also acknowledges that its resort to the Gothic past is unable entirely to escape the ‘melancholy retrospect’ of ‘History’. With Reeve’s distinction between history and romance in mind, the chapter concludes by suggesting that, through its mediation of Otranto, The Old English Baron helped to make the diverse resources of the Gothic past available to subsequent writers, and at the same time to ensure that its questioning of Britain’s Gothic inheritance remained integral to the tradition of ‘domestic Gothic’ that it inaugurated.

This chapter discusses violence associated with the exercise of lordship and the culture of nobility in Europe from ca. 500-1500. For most of the twentieth century, historians argued that lordly violence rose and fell in inverse proportion to the power of ‘sovereign’ rulers, such as kings and emperors. It is now recognized that aristocrats in general and lords in particular played roles in medieval societies and polities that made their use of violence not just tolerable but also necessary. The practice of ‘feud’ has also come in for reassessment, increasingly understood not as anarchic or usurpatory, but re-envisaged as rule-based and self-limiting. Yet, if seigneurial violence now appears much more socially productive and politically intelligible to historians, it is important to realize that the exercise and experience of seigneurial violence varied a great deal according to social position and context. Aristocratic women were less likely than aristocratic men to be involved in such conflicts, and non-aristocrats, of both sexes, bore the brunt of the violence. This essay proceeds chronologically, examining changes in the ideas and practices that shaped how lords and nobles used violence in different regions.

Viewed, as it often still is, from a neo-Romantic perspective, chivalry becomes a force for order and hedge against violence, but this represents decidedly post-medieval conceptions. European medieval chivalry actually constituted the ideals and practices of the warrior elite, elaborating views on licit violence, lived piety, valorized status, gendered relationships, and the distribution of wealth. This chapter takes chivalric violence as its focus, carefully distinguishing when medieval sources are describing reality and when they present idealistic plans for reforming knighthood. The search is for authentic knightly frames of mind and courses of action. Clearly, they needed some framework to guide their demanding lives and as elite warriors obviously essential in their world, they could choose and shape working codes that met their needs and simply ignore or modify troublesomely restrictive conceptions thrust at them. Of the many sources close to practicing knights used in the chapter, two receive special emphasis, the History of William Marshal (the biography of the manor cross-Channel knight of late 12th and early 13thC) and the Book of Chivalry (written by the leading French knight of mid 14thC). Both show the powerful role of this warrior code emphasizing the role of prowess in the search for honour, sustained by religious piety showing divine blessing on knighthood as one sustaining society.