Abstract
This chapter starts by defining the terms by which the iconic character Philip Marlowe is considered chivalrous and knightly. As a corrective, it then considers the reality of medieval knights and the functioning of actual medieval chivalry. Next it considers the representation of knights and chivalry in medieval romances, and then in the medieval revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It establishes these as successive iterations (different, but sharing terminology) of our core concepts. It shows that idealizations of knighthood and chivalry are rooted in idealized but violent masculinity and whiteness; and it reminds us that the medieval origin of these concepts and social positions emerge from a constitutive class exclusivity as well.
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Notes
- 1.
For considerations of overlap** formulaic features, see Cawelti 1977 (esp. chs. 1 and 2), following the typology established by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Cawelti considers modern romance novels rather than chivalric romance, but there are interesting overlaps at 37, 42, and 161. Frye insightfully considers the mystery in line with chivalric romance in The Secular Scripture (1976, 40, 44–5, and 60). Skenazy builds on both critics, considering how “The tough-guy writers presented the traditions of romance in new dress” (1982, 9). The established literary-historical link between the chivalric romance and mystery genres is the Western: see Skenazy; Slotkin 1973, esp. ch. 6; and Klein 1994.
- 2.
The subject sustains book-length considerations, exploring the varieties of knighthood and chivalry across historical periods and geographical regions: I have particularly benefitted from Maurice Keen’s exhaustive Chivalry (1984), Richard Barber’s eminently readable The Knight and Chivalry (2000), and Richard W. Kaeuper’s magnificent Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999). I shall quote other sources as I go. For an impressively concise overview of the nuances of the knight’s changing social status across five hundred years, see Constance Brittain Bouchard, chief consultant, Knights in History and Legend (2009, 14–17).
- 3.
Knights are noble by the twelfth century (Kaeuper 1999, 189–90; Keen 1984, 4, 27–9, 143; Barber 2000, 3–46, esp. 27 and 37; Bouchard 2009, 15–16). Of course, “noble” describes varying degrees of wealth and status; particularly good on this is Bouchard’s Strong of Body, Brave and Noble: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France (1998). A lively discussion of the disagreement among historians about the class of knights can be found in John Gillingham’s essay “Thegns and Knights in Eleventh-Century England: Who Was Then the Gentleman?” (2003, esp. 168–172). Gillingham concludes that English knights are gentry even in the eleventh century, if not before. To put aside distracting hair-splitting about the categories of nobility, aristocracy, and gentry, and to generalize in a fair and useful way: knights occupied privileged social status relative to the mass of society. This was in fact true even of the warriors in pre-Latinized Germanic tribes.
- 4.
The edition of Malory I shall quote is the 1893 Dent edition, based on Strachey’s 1868 Globe edition, with modernized spelling. My copy is a facsimile of the Dent edition, and since neither this nor the original are the easiest editions to come by, I will provide, in addition to page numbers, book and chapter numbers for ease of reference to other editions of the Morte Darthur (the most convenient of which is the digitized Strachey-based edition available online at Google Books [Strachey 1868]). The Dent edition was reprinted by Everyman’s Library in 1906, so it was the one that would have populated the shelves of most schools, bookshops, and home libraries in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, making it the most likely candidate to have been Chandler’s edition.
- 5.
Malory’s blood, kin, and lineage are obviously biological and less obviously social for us now, but they were both in the Middle Ages. We can see this sociobiological double helix in the telling two-fer gentle: deriving from the Old French gentil = high-born, it comes from the Latin gēns, race or clan, from the root Latin word gignere “to beget” (Barnhart 1995, 314). Thus “gentle” uses biology to rationalize the social order: high-born (“gentle”) people naturally have superior (“gentle”) qualities. It is instructive to compare two other English words from the same root: the biological generate and the social (class) gentry. We will see what Chandler does with “gentlemen” in Chapter 4.
- 6.
See Keen 1984, ch. 8, “The Idea of Nobility.” Keen thinks that commissioned histories of noble families should be considered alongside romances and chansons de geste in the self-mythologizing of the period (32–4). As Barber points out, the “most visible expression” of this aristocratic self-obsession is in heraldry (2000, 43).
- 7.
I borrow the potent phrase “aristocratic ideology” from Richard McKeon, who uses it to describe the way in which “honor as virtue” gets represented as “an inherited characteristic” so that the ruling class may naturalize its rule (1987, 131–33; quote on 131). For a full exposition of how the mechanism of self-distinguishing works in the field of class dynamics, see Pierre Bourdieu’s masterwork Distinction (1984).
- 8.
Kaeuper tempers Twain in a scholarly paraphrase: “Their lives may have featured showy acts of violence, but knights were thoroughly pious” (2004, 104). Kaeuper 1999 inspiredly uses Twain’s satiric novel as its point of departure.
- 9.
For some very grim reading regarding what we might judiciously call knightly terrorism, see John A. Lynn’s “Chivalry and Chevauchée: The Ideal, the Real, and the Perfect in Medieval European Warfare,” ch. 3 of Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (2008; quote on 85). See also Strickland 1996, 176–81 (horrific acts directed at common infantry) and 258–329 (directed at civilians); Kaeuper 1988, 77–116; and Kaeuper 1999, 176–85, which considers the unblushing representation of knightly atrocities in the chansons and romances.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
Jennifer G. Wollock thinks that Kaeuper, in deromanticizing chivalry, goes “too far in the other direction,” though she does not refute his historical accuracy (2011, 2). Bouchard et. al. (2009) coolly confirm the centrality of violence, if it needs confirmation: it is, after all, the point of martial horsemanship, swords, shields, and armor, not to mention castles.
- 13.
The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages puts it bluntly: “Chivalry was an important aspect of a broader cultural movement to moderate the violent tendencies of the early knights while maintaining them as fierce opponents of non-Christians” (Cantor 1999, 119–20). For Bernard, see Bouchard 1998, 84, and Keen 1984, 5 and 49.
- 14.
Thus, Marlowe as “crusader” is a particularly infelicitous suggestion (Durham 1963, 32; Cawelti 1977, 152). Regarding crusaders against Muslim civilians: killing civilians is an integral part of besieging towns, both during and after the siege; and sieges were primary in medieval warfare generally and in the Christian invasion of the Middle East specifically. Succinctly stated, “the process was so barbaric that even contemporaries were outraged: the ‘infidels’ were butchered en masse, and women and children were not spared” (Nerlich 1987, 16). For the horrific history of crusaders against Jews, see Eidelberg’s edition of Jewish Crusade narratives (1977), and the extensive work of Robert Chazan, particularly European Jewry and the First Crusade (1987). For crusaders against Albigensian heretics, see Pegg (2008).
- 15.
So early that “makeover” may be too strong a word, since chivalry was coterminously written into existence and enacted during the twelfth century. Bouchard thinks that chivalry is primarily a literary phenomenon (1998, esp. ch. 4), but I am more persuaded by the narratives depicting the mutual interaction of the literary and the lived given by Barber, Keen, and Kaeuper. For a thoroughgoing exploration of the two-way relation of romantic art and aristocratic life in this period, see historian John W. Baldwin’s eloquent study, Aristocratic Life in Medieval France: The Romances of Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil, 1190–1230 (2000).
- 16.
Not just romances, but chronicles and biographies as well: Kaeuper’s Chivalry explores a continuum between “imaginative” and ostensibly historical literature, while Barber shows how the great chronicler Froissart adheres to romantic literary conventions. For demonstrations of the intertwined lives of romance and historiography, see Heng’s Empire of Magic (2003) and Stein’s Reality Fictions (2006). For a penetrating analysis of how romantic literary artistry embodies aristocratic class fantasy, see Erich Auerbach’s classic essay “The Knight Sets Forth,” in Mimesis (1953).
- 17.
The clause in brackets is not in the Caxton printing that has been the basis for most printed editions of the Morte, but is in the earlier-state Winchester manuscript, discovered in 1934, which is the text used for Stephen H. A. Shepherd’s remarkable Norton Critical Edition (Malory 2004, 77).
- 18.
At one point in the Morte, a damsel petitions Arthur to help her mistress, whose castle is being besieged. The supplicant assures the court that her mistress “is a lady of great worship and great lands.” However, because the fair unknown won’t divulge her lady’s name, and thus her bona fides, Arthur refuses the aid of his knights (1985, 222–23; bk. 7, ch. 2). Even when the aid is granted, it turns into a martial game of rescue: it’s not about the endangered lady, but the knights.
- 19.
Elspeth Kennedy explores the primarily narratological but often thematically religious functions of this topos in her excellent essay “Failure in Arthurian Romance” (1991).
- 20.
For a compelling reading of Malory as a revivalist of a bygone courtly idealism riddled with ambivalence, see Pochoda, Arthurian Propaganda: Le Morte Darthur as an Historical Ideal of Life (1971).
- 21.
Besides Gravdal’s foundational Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (1991), see her 1992 essay “Chrétien de Troyes, Gratian, and the Medieval Romance of Sexual Violence.” For the unavoidable issue of rape in Malory ’s biography, see Catherine Batt’s now-classic “Malory and Rape” (originally published in 1997, and reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of Le Morte Darthur [Batt 2004]).
- 22.
In fact, maybe someone else did: see the anonymous “Ballad Farce,” which preceded the Quijote by a decade or so and contains its basic idea; it is helpfully reprinted in the first Norton Critical Edition of Cervantes’s novel (1981, 841-48). For a view of the Quijote as pallbearer to romance rather than its executioner, see Thomas 1920, 178–79; cf. Eisenberg 1982, 50–53. For the historical context of the decline of romance in pre-Cervantine Spain, see Sieber 1985. Borges’s droll invention Pierre Menard claims that Don Quijote is not “inevitable,” and is even “unnecessary,” in the puckish “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1983, 41). Despite all this, it should be said that few works play their games so delightfully, and on so many fronts, as the Quijote.
- 23.
Byron was a reader of Hurd, who sixty years earlier had beat him to the trope: Hurd wrote that Spain’s decline on the world stage resulted from Cervantes “laughing away” what remained of his country’s aristocratic “prowess” (1911, 62).
- 24.
The short prose piece from which the epigraph is taken, Byron’s 1813 Addition to the Preface to Cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a brisk critique of medieval chivalry and its reception to that point (1986, 21–2).
- 25.
I say “ideal” and “retrospective” to avoid conventional reductivism: the “feudal order” was never so orderly, and the world that modern theorists since Weber have retrospectively called “enchanted” probably seemed less than enchanting to the masses of slaves, peasants, and myriad other subaltern subjects (a point made by the Quijote!) For an excellent brief overview of the thematics of the transition to modernity relevant to our discussion here, see Löwy and Sayre 2001, 18; elaborated 29–39. For more extended genealogies, see Berman’s classic Reenchantment of the World (1981) and Nerlich (1987). For the concept of desengaño (disenchantment) specifically, see the wonderful overview given by Mercedes Allendesalazar in the Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014).
- 26.
For an in-depth look at what I can only briefly glance at here, see, in addition to the sources in the next note, Arthur Johnston’s Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (1964) for the original (eighteenth-century) scholarly construction of the Middle Ages as “romantic,” and, for the poets, Elizabeth Fay’s Romantic Medievalism (2002).
- 27.
Another vast but endlessly fascinating subject. For Scott in nineteenth-century British and European medievalism, see Alice Chandler’s 1965 essay as a base text; Girouard 1981, chs. 3 and 4, for more color; and Ragussis 1993 for a recent study of the ethnoracial politics of Ivanhoe’s revivalism in particular. (I will consider Scott’s American context below.) For medievalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British culture generally, see both Girouard and Michael Alexander 2017. For Arthur specifically in both American and British literature since 1800, see Taylor and Brewer 1983; for a look at the racio-national work that Arthur does in nineteenth-century Britain, see Barczewski 2000. For visual art and multiple media, see the work of Debra N. Mancoff. Finally, for a medieval historian’s consideration of “the Victorian misconstruction of the Middle Ages,” see Cantor 1991, 27–9 and 374–75 (quote on 29).
- 28.
- 29.
Nor should we forget that this was the function of Arthurian romance from the beginning. Keen speculates that the Arthurian mythos allowed more freedom than the other two most well-known “matters” of medieval romance, classical and Carolingian, because those carried greater expectations of historicity (1984, 114). This accords with Auerbach’s thesis that the fantasy element of medieval Arthurian romance, liberated of any compulsion to social realism, singularly accommodated projections of class fantasies (1953). Perhaps the protean capacity of the matière de Bretagne, originally so amenable to aristocratic mythologization, also accounts for its improbable ability to reemerge in the particularly unromantic era of the steam locomotive, urbanization, and industrial capitalism.
- 30.
Keen 1984, ch. 6, “The Historical Mythology of Chivalry,” is wonderful on the uses to which the past was put in twelfth-century writing.
- 31.
The limitations of the current work did not allow me to dwell on the constitutive Othering practices of romance as much as I would have liked. However, there’s little left unsaid by Geraldine Heng’s magisterial Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (2003); see also her recent, equally compelling The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018). The classic articulation is Fredric Jameson’s 1975 essay “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre” (esp. 140–41), later incorporated into The Political Unconscious. The foundational frame for delineating the Othering of the Muslim world is of course Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978); for recent considerations of medieval Orientalism specifically, see Calkin 2005 and Akbari 2009. In an American context, Toni Morrison has powerfully argued for an Africanist Other to American identity in Dancing in the Dark (1992): see esp. ch. 2, “Romancing the Shadow,” for the key role of romance.
- 32.
- 33.
For one exposition of what Du Bois is talking about, see Nancy MacLean’s Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994).
- 34.
See too Baldwin’s eloquent deconstruction of the honorable-lost-cause trope in Faulkner’s writing—“the image of ruin, gallantry, and death”—in his 1956 essay “Faulkner and Desegregation” (1956, quote on 572).
- 35.
The original can be found in Twain’s 1883 romp Life on the Mississippi, esp. ch. 46, “Enchantments and Enchanters,” though Twain ridicules Southern “grotesque ‘chivalry’ doings and romantic juvenilities” throughout (1982, quote on 468). For scholarly discussion of Twain’s critique, see Dekker 1990, ch. 8 and especially 365n2. For substantive scholarly support of Twain’s general point about the South’s chivalrous self-regard, see the work of Wyatt-Brown (2001 and 2007).
On American medievalism generally, see Mathis 2002; for Scott’s central place in the American revival, see Orians 1932, and Kenney and Workman 1975.
- 36.
See Johanssen 1985, ch. 4 (“Visions of Romance and Chivalry”). The critic quoted is Freeman Hunt, qtd. in Johannsen 1985, 77. For the racial Othering that underlay this “romantic” war, see (among many) Johannsen 1985, especially 289–93, but also 22–3, 167, 260, and 278. Historian Amy S. Greenberg makes the point that the call for war against Mexico was loudest in the South, among those who referred to themselves as “the chivalry” (2012, 97).
- 37.
- 38.
As chronicler of the Hundred Years War, Froissart was a “self-appointed ‘Secretary of Chivalry,’” romanticizing nobility and single combat as much as Chrétien or Malory ever did (Barber 2000, 147). Scott loved him. To give an indication of Froissart’s class politics: in his account of the Peasant Uprising of 1381, the benighted commoners rise up because they are spoiled by their “abundance and prosperity” (1978, 211).
- 39.
On this point, see Leonard S. Marcus’s recent study, The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter (2019).
- 40.
- 41.
- 42.
This was written by U.S. Commissioner of Education William T. Harris, general editor of the Appletons’ [sic] Home Reading Series designed to get such books out of the school and into the home. Commissioner Harris was not wrong: for an overview of the ideology of chivalry and romance among the European explorers, see Jennifer R. Goodman, Chivalry and Exploration, 1298–1630 (1998).
- 43.
Greenberg is speaking about the war with Mexico specifically here. Also relevant in this context is her important study of gender in mid-nineteenth-century America, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (2005).
- 44.
For more on these constructions of whiteness, see Nell Irvin Painter’s History of White People (2010).
- 45.
It’s no coincidence that in addition to his crusader titles, Henty wrote historical adventures like With Clive in India: Or, the Beginnings of an Empire (1883), With Lee in Virginia (1889), and By Right of Conquest; Or, With Cortez in Mexico (1890). (Chandler refers to him in his letters.) The same racialized chivalro-imperialist logic that traverses Henty’s corpus also conjoins the medievalist tableaus of painters like Dicksee and Millais (referenced above) with their Orientalist productions. For a thorough and bracing overview of the continued Orientalizing logic of modern medievalism, see Ganim 2005.
- 46.
- 47.
The period in question is 1908–12: Chandler wrote poetry, essays, and his earliest known story (sadly, still unlocated), entitled “The Rose-Leaf Romance.” See Robert F. Moss’s indispensable Raymond Chandler: A Literary Reference (2003), which reprints a selection of the early material, and provides facsimiles, illustrations, and commentary (23–32). Moss follows Matthew J. Bruccoli’s work collecting the items in Chandler Before Marlowe (1973). The unlocated story is noted by Bruccoli in Raymond Chandler: A Checklist (1968), 17.
- 48.
In fact, Freeman does some insightful remarking herself: see 44–5.
- 49.
William Gilmore Simms, author of a biography of that sixteenth-century paragon of chivalry Chevalier Bayard, qtd. in Johanssen (1985, 73).
- 50.
Of course, the universalization of straight, “Anglo”/white men is an invention of Renaissance humanism and a key tool of the Enlightenment project generally, but Jefferson put it in its canonical American form at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. For a history of this universalizing impulse, whose goal is to “pound alternative conceptions of human nature into submission,” see Robert C. Solomon, The Bully Culture: Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Transcendental Pretense 1750–1850 (1993), quote on xi. See also Hall 2017, 88–9.
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Rizzuto, A.D. (2021). A Sense of the Past: A Brisk Overview of Chivalry and Romance. In: Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88371-3_2
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