Picture medieval times: Grand castles, glorious tournaments, and—most importantly—heroic knights. Of course, there was plague and death and poverty and murder, but we tend to forget those in lieu of marvelous tales of noble deeds.
These are rosy memories of the past adopted by current societies around the 1800s, according to historian Richard Kaeuper.
In reality, chivalry was quite violent, and fairly grisly, according to a report by Futurity. “It’s hands-on cutting and thrusting. It’s a very bloody profession, and [people from the last several centuries] admire it to excess,” said Kaeuper, a professor at the University of Rochester and author of a new book on the subject called Medieval Chivalry.
Moreover, chivalry wasn’t just restricted to being a warrior code. In its own time period—roughly the latter part of the 11th century until the 16th century—it pervaded most aspects of society.
“It’s an immense topic that goes everywhere,” Kaeuper said.
Chivalry itself, according to Kaeuper, refers to “deeds of great valor performed by knights.” But beyond knights, it refers to a set of ideas and practices key to medieval times. “[V]irtually every medieval voice we can hear accepts a chivalric mentalité [mentality] and seems anxious to advance it (and often to reform it toward some desired goal) as a key buttress to society, even to civilization,” he wrote.
In other words, nearly every writer of the time worked under the influence of a chivalric mindset, allowing those attitudes and ideas to shape their writings, both consciously and unconsciously.
Who came up with chivalry?
According to Kaeuper, chivalry itself is “pretty much a French creation” that spread throughout Western Europe in various phases.
First came the knights—a military profession. Next, as the knights become more widespread and famous, these elite men began to develop their own special identity as tournaments, literary romance, and epics began to dominate the landscape. Finally, these ideals developed by knights spread beyond them, dominating other peoples by changing their thoughts and behaviors.
By the end, chivalry spread from the knights of France to the peoples of England, Italy, Spain, and Germany, a noble trend (and a bloody one).
We can thank our European predecessors for forgetting that part, though. Around the 19th century, various Europeans and some Americans began to look back at the Middle Ages as a sort of Golden Age of their ancestors, in an attempt to escape from modern issues and solidify their national identity.
“Far from dark,” Kaeuper wrote, “the medieval past was not only colorful and fascinating, but too important and too useful to be ignored. The romantic revivers did not and perhaps could not recognize that they were altering the original drastically and investing it with meanings that would have surprised its first practitioners.”
This is a fairly common problem with modern people interacting with the past; we are too far-removed from the context to understand it as the original people would have, an instead impress our own beliefs upon them.
“If you start thinking modern as you go into the past, you distort the past. If you start with the past and see if it informs the present, I think you’re on the right path,” he said.
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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