Constructing Chivalry
One of the most powerful men in the country—a statesman and military officer—is alone in a room with a woman, who sways toward him in a dress that bares nearly everything. She isn’t here of her own will; another powerful man has ordered her to show his guest a good time, and there’s no knowing what may happen if she disappoints.
Gently, without offense, Gawain declines her advances. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late fourteenth-century chivalric romance by an anonymous poet, presents this restraint as Gawain’s most admirable achievement, the epitome of heroic, masculine strength and skill. Reading today, we can’t help but ask: is such a scene believable? Why did the Gawain-poet write it?
Bodleian MS. Rawl. Q. b. 6. A late fourteenth-century Romance of Lancelot du Lac
It’s easy to dismiss chivalry as the stuff of romance, belonging to the Middle Ages’ popular adventure stories, not the actual conduct of its governors and soldiers. It’s a lovely idea, summed up well in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur by the Pentecostal Oath sworn by the knights of the Round Table: “never to do outrageousity nor murder, and always to flee treason; also, by no mean to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asketh mercy . . . and always to do ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen succor upon pain of death. Also, that no man take no battles in a wrongful quarrel for no law, ne for no world’s goods.” While chivalry might now be most strongly associated with deference to women, medieval knights were more concerned with the honor that guaranteed verbal agreements between political agents and forbade crimes against humanity by military men with little oversight. What connects these standards of conduct is a paradoxical relationship between strength and weakness. The ideal knight was supposed to combine violence and meekness, ferocity and mercy, in perfect proportions, “a lion in field and a lamb in hall.” His exercise of power was justified by his service to those who lacked it—women, noncombatants, the defeated.
Today, amid an avalanche of evidence about powerful men’s abuses from the casting couch to the police chokehold, it’s easy to see the holes and hypocrisies in such ideals. The medieval chivalric code had definite limits. It applied even in theory only to the noble class, a tiny fraction of the population. It primarily governed their relationships with one another, not lower classes; a vanquished knight might be spared (and exchanged for valuable ransom) where a foot-soldier was struck down without a second thought. Even within this limited scope of application, medieval knights notoriously failed to live up to their professed standards.
Slaughter of the Amalekites, Saul's Last Stand from the Morgan Bible
We can catch a glimpse of the darker side of knighthood in the poems of twelfth-century troubadour Bertran de Born, who writes rather more passionately about battle than love. In one lyric, he lists things that please him on a spring day: flowers and birdsong, horses in bright array, refugees fleeing, knights “splitting heads and hacking arms,” corpses in ditches. His relish for war is unapologetic, celebrating violence rather than excusing it as a means to nobler ends. The attitude of many knights may be summed up in the motto of fourteenth-century Breton lord Olivier de Clisson: pour ce qu’il me plest (because I like it).
The picture for women is also grim. Knights’ exaggerated deference to ladies only applied to women of elevated social standing. Regarding peasants, Andreas Capellanus writes in his influential twelfth-century treatise The Art of Courtly Love, “if you should, by some chance, fall in love with some of their women . . . do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace them by force.” If a chaplain could write such advice under the patronage of a princess, powerful men’s actual conduct toward vulnerable women must have been evil indeed.
The problem of chivalry is but one instance of a deeper question about culture: is it beneficial for people to profess higher standards than they actually attain? Do lofty ideals improve flawed people’s behavior, nudging them to live up to—or at least closer to—a standard they would not otherwise have attempted? Or do idealized representations disguise evil, upholding a corrupt status quo and persuading the oppressed to remain complacent and complicit? Surely the answer must be both. Some knights will protect a prisoner of war or a woman alone on the road, even when there are no other incentives for doing so, simply because “that’s what knights do.” Others will kill the prisoner or rape the woman, expecting to get off scot-free because “of course knights don’t do things like that.” Both potentialities deserve our attention.
Our modern culture of critique excels at puncturing idealizations and unmasking hypocrites. The intellectual apparatus developed to scrutinize structures of oppression, however, has not been matched by equally acute methods of understanding cultural structures that facilitate human flourishing. When it comes to chivalry, modern scholars’ eyes are well-trained to spot inconsistencies, omissions, and self-aggrandizement, and their default stance is skepticism toward romanticized representations produced by and for the elite. A focus on the very real failures of chivalry, however, may not grasp why it existed in the first place and what it was designed to do, missing out on not only a full understanding of historical phenomena, but also a present resource.
The chivalric combination of strength and meekness is a social technology—and, I believe, a brilliant one—intended to address a serious problem faced by many societies, including our own. I call it a technology because someone had to invent it, an innovation as artificial as the wheel or the stirrup, which was adopted by users both shaped by its affordances and capable of creatively repurposing them.
The problem the chivalric code addresses is simple: men are dangerous. While of course individuals vary, men’s typically superior physical strength and higher levels of testosterone, which correlate with greater risk-taking, competitiveness, aggression, and sexual drive, make them far more likely to harm others than women. The effects are visible at all levels of society. Young men who lack a clear path towards a stable status of manhood may explode into senseless violence. Men in positions of power may coerce others to gratify their desires. Most troublingly, the very people we entrust with government-sanctioned force are not immune to these temptations, but prone to abuse authority. Give young men military equipment that makes them feel invincible, train them in skillful violence, and send them out with minimal oversight or accountability, and they will do terrifying things. We should also expect, then, for many knights to pillage, rape, and murder unless restrained from doing so.
Every society needs social technologies to harness the potentially dangerous forces of young men’s risk-seeking, aggression, and sexuality and direct those energies into prosocial endeavors rather than destructive ones. The genius of chivalry is that it fashions means for such control out of precisely the most volatile elements of masculinity. Anxiety about manliness can become a tool to curb aggression when excessive or misdirected violence is characterized as lack of self-control, making the perpetrator look immature or weak. Competition between men, a potential source of conflict, can instead restrain it when they gain status by excelling in courtesy and generosity. The whole elaborate ideology of “courtly love” seems like a stratagem to make young men’s outsized sexual drive an engine for socially desirable behavior, giving women dictatorial control over the progress of romantic relationships and promising sexual rewards for exceptional courage, integrity, and obedience. In sum, chivalry is an attempt to internalize restraints so that powerful men police one another and themselves—masculinity taming the excesses of masculinity.
The chivalric code certainly had more influence on cultural representations, like fictionalized historical narratives and fantastic romances, than it did on actual behavior. Even so, its profound cultural impact testifies to its sway over men’s minds. The systematic effort to yoke together strength and meekness, making masculine status competitions serve the vulnerable, leaves enduring records in our language. The very word for “high-status” has come to mean “moderate” and “kindly”: gentleman, gentle man. An ideal that has so lastingly shaped language and culture must also have exerted influence on real men, shaming bad behavior and elevating aspirations, even if it did not consistently prevent brutality.Chivalry may have always been a fantasy crafted for entertainment and propaganda. Even if it had never existed before, we need it now. The toxic masculinity we deplore cannot be driven out by feminization; it can only be replaced with vigorous, virtuous masculinities that work with the affordances of biological maleness. Force cannot be eradicated from society; to live safely, we must make the people we entrust with the use of force trustworthy. While medieval chivalry cannot be naively applied to modern contexts, it does provide a model we can learn from as we address our own problems with masculinity and violence—an approach that is constructive as well as critical.
Sir Konrad von Limpurg armed by his lady in the Codex Manesse.
The Gawain-poet knew very well that “chivalry” was constructed and contested, a cultural achievement, not a natural state of affairs. He takes pains to juxtapose two contrasting models for masculinity, intercutting bloody hunting scenes with the subtle conversations in which Gawain’s prowess is courtesy. He recognizes, too, the complexity with which religious, courtly, and knightly codes of behavior can both reinforce and contradict one another. In fact, the poem does not so much describe an existing chivalric ideal as intervene to form one: this masculinity is more admirable than that one, this code supersedes that when they conflict. This fictional narrative takes up the great social technology of the chivalric paradox—strength in meekness—in order to improve it: testing it under extreme circumstances, pointing out contradictions and hypocrisies, proposing refinements, all to help readers understand and internalize virtuous restraint.
While poetry alone cannot solve social problems, the literature of chivalry takes up honor and shame as tools to shape how real people understand themselves, what they desire, and thus what they do outside of fiction. As we strive for justice, it is necessary to expose corruption and critique structural oppression, but also to hold up ideals for emulation, repurposing the raw materials of human nature to build better structures—to put into practice what poets imagined when they made strong men boast of their meekness.
Kathryn Mogk Wagner is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard University. She studies late medieval religious writing and liturgical theology.