Chivalry

After two hours of seminars and lectures of chivalry in Renaissance Europe this afternoon has been interesting but heavy (when Durham third year historians only have 4 hours a week, 2 hours in one afternoon seems quite a trial!).

While chivalry in our society today is something to be desired, in Renaissance Europe, and particularly beyond the Alps, it was central to defining how people lived. Chivalry developed into somewhat of a culture, for the aristocratic elite, but also for the lay people of Europe. My lecturer described it earlier as "The culture of the arms-bearing classes of Western Europe" which is an interesting concept; how something which we just view as a desirably theory today, could have been a central influence in the armies (and this term is used loosely) of the 15th century.

With the violent nature of 15th century Europe which was plagued by battles and defined by war, chivalry was inextricably bound up with notions of warfare. Courage is was a key element in being part of a chivalric order. These were organisations of knights such as the Order of the Golden Fleece, and the Order of the Garter established by Edward III England in 1348. Members could be dismissed from the order if they displayed cowardliness on the battlefields and participation in war continued to define the European nobleman.

What I found most interesting about the idea was that even though chivalry was bound up with ideas of warfare, religion equally remained as a central element to it. Chivalry was not simply a secular code of values, many of the orders above mentioned were built around the idea of religion. Much of the rituals surrounding these orders involved holding masses for the death of other members and the Order of the Golden Fleece had its own chapels.

So, the origins of chivalry, or at least when it became a key part of European culture in the 14th and 15th centuries, are very different to what we would class as an act of 'chivalry' today. Now we think of it as courting and of en behaving like gentlemen, yet in the middle ages it was something very much associated with the arms-bearers of Europe.

As with a lot of history that we study, it is important to try not to project our present notions and beliefs onto the period which we analyse, and instead to try to understand the nature of society at the time.