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"Chivalry Europe."
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Medieval knights and chivalry
\"After Rome's fall, some of the medieval European kingdoms that rose upon its wreckage maintained units of mounted warriors. Over time, elite individuals in the ranks of those units gained fame as knights--fighters of exceptional skill and courage, whose armor grew to cover their entire bodies and who also enjoyed high social status. Knights took an oath to serve God and their king and developed a special code of honorable behavior called chivalry, which, regrettably for their victims, they did not always follow.\"--Publisher's web site.
Book
Holy Warriors
The medieval code of chivalry demanded that warrior elites demonstrate fierce courage in battle, display prowess with weaponry, and avenge any strike against their honor. They were also required to be devout Christians. How, then, could knights pledge fealty to the Prince of Peace, who enjoined the faithful to turn the other cheek rather than seek vengeance and who taught that the meek, rather than glorious fighters in tournaments, shall inherit the earth? By what logic and language was knighthood valorized?In Holy Warriors, Richard Kaeuper argues that while some clerics sanctified violence in defense of the Holy Church, others were sorely troubled by chivalric practices in everyday life. As elite laity, knights had theological ideas of their own. Soundly pious yet independent, knights proclaimed the validity of their bloody profession by selectively appropriating religious ideals. Their ideology emphasized meritorious suffering on campaign and in battle even as their violence enriched them and established their dominance. In a world of divinely ordained social orders, theirs was blessed, though many sensitive souls worried about the ultimate price of rapine and destruction.Kaeuper examines how these paradoxical chivalric ideals were spread in a vast corpus of literature from exempla and chansons de geste to romance. Through these works, both clerics and lay military elites claimed God's blessing for knighthood while avoiding the contradictions inherent in their fusion of chivalry with a religion that looked back to the Sermon on the Mount for its ethical foundation.
eBook
Just Wars and Moral Victories: Surprise, deception and the normative framework of European war in the later Middle Ages
By exploring the moral and legal context of medieval strategic thinking, this work explains how the use of surprise and deception could, in certain circumstances, be reconciled with the practise of chivalric warfare.
eBook
Kings, Knights and Bankers
In Kings, Knights, and Bankers, Richard Kaeuper presents a lifetime of medieval research on Italian financiers, English kingship, chivalric violence, and knightly piety. His foundational work on public finance connects Italian merchant banking with the growth of state power at the turn of the fourteenth century. Subsequent articles on law and order offer measured contributions to the continuing debate over the growth of governance and its relationship with contemporary disorder. He also convincingly proves that knights, the foremost military professionals of the medieval world, considered their prowess as both a source of honor and of sanctification. All interested in the history of medieval chivalry, governance, piety, and public finance can learn from this impressive collection of articles.
eBook
Prowess, piety, and public order in medieval society : studies in honor of Richard W. Kaeuper
This festschrift in Richard Kaeuper's honor brings together scholars from across disciplines to engage with three salient concerns of medieval society - knightly prowess and violence, lay and religious piety, and public order and government - from a variety of perspectives.
eBook
Lots of things you want to know about knights : ... and some you don't!
\"How much do you really know about medieval knights? What happened to a captured knight? Who was the greatest knight? Each page in this series presents a large full-color illustration and simple paragraph containing fun facts about gear, historical figures, and day-to-day life that encourage kids to explore this high-interest topic in more detail.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Forged in the Shadow of Mars
In Forged in the Shadow of
Mars , Peter W. Sposato traces chivalry's
powerful influence on the mentalitè and behavior of a sizeable
segment of the elite in late medieval Florence. He finds
that the strenuous knights and men-at-arms of the Florentine
chivalric elite-a cultural community comprised of men from both
traditional and newly emerged elite lineages-embraced a chivalric
ideology that was fundamentally martial and violent. Chivalry
helped to shape a common identity among these men based on the
profession of arms and the ready use of violence against both their
peers and those they perceived to be their social inferiors. This
violence, often transgressive in nature, was not only crucial to
asserting and defending personal, familial, and corporate honor,
but was also inherently praiseworthy. In this way, Sposato
highlights the sharp differences between chivalry and the more
familiar civic ideology of the popolo grasso, the Florentine
mercantile and banking elite who came to dominate Florence
politically and economically during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries.
As a result, in Forged in the Shadow of Mar s, Sposato
challenges the traditional scholarly view of chivalry as foreign to
the social and cultural landscape of Florence and contests its
reputation as a civilizing force. By reexamining the connection
between chivalric literature and actual practice and identity
formation among historical knights and men-at-arms, he likewise
provides an important corrective to assumptions about the nature of
elite violence and identity in medieval Italian cities.
eBook