Rethinking Chivalry And Courtly Love

This book offers an overview of the origins, growth, and influence of chivalry and courtly love, casting new light on the importance of these medieval ideals for understanding world history and culture to the present day. Rethinking Chivalry and Courtly Love shows that these two interlinked medieval era concepts are best understood in light of each other. It is the first book to explore the multicultural origins of chivalry and courtly love in tandem, tracing their sources back to the ancient world, then follow their development—separately and together—through medieval life and literature. In addition to examining the history of chivalry and courtly love, this remarkable volume looks at their enduring legacy—not just in popular media but in molding our present-day concepts of human rights, professional ethics, military conduct, and gender relations. Readers will see how understanding the tenets of the chivalrous life helps us understand our own world today.

This book offers an overview of the origins, growth, and influence of chivalry and courtly love, casting new light on the importance of these medieval ideals for understanding world history and culture to the present day. Rethinking Chivalry and Courtly Love shows that these two interlinked medieval era concepts are best understood in light of each other. It is the first book to explore the multicultural origins of chivalry and courtly love in tandem, tracing their sources back to the ancient world, then follow their development—separately and together—through medieval life and literature. In addition to examining the history of chivalry and courtly love, this remarkable volume looks at their enduring legacy—not just in popular media but in molding our present-day concepts of human rights, professional ethics, military conduct, and gender relations. Readers will see how understanding the tenets of the chivalrous life helps us understand our own world today.

Seminar paper from the year 1999 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1 (A), University of Zurich (English Seminar), course: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 16 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper discusses how the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight uses, explores and sometimes undermines the conventions of the Arthurian romance genre. As a basis for this investigation, a definition of the genre is sketched, using a structuralist model along with a set of typical motifs found in many romances. Having established the essential genre elements the papier then examines the way the Gawain-poet makes use of these in his text. After identifying the fundamentally generic structure of the poem the author concentrates on incidents where the poet plays ironically with the reader's genre expectations.

The importance of chivalry is taught to little girls and boys from the start, outlining for them the various rules of male obligation that will guide sexual relations throughout their lifetimes; i.e., males are here to protect and provide for women. The victories of legendary cinematic heroes whose brave deeds are rounded with applause and happily-ever-afters appears to seal the fate of chivalry as the future path of every man. Those few who do pause to question chivalry's values however - its rote expectation of male sacrifice, possibility of danger or injury, impacts on mental health, potential for exploitation and abuse, or the question of valid compensations for ongoing sacrifices - may conclude that it serves as a poor life map, or worse that it amounts to a malignant and toxic form of masculinity. This book examines the realities of chivalry beyond the usual platitudes to see what's really at stake for men. The essays, written by men's advocates Peter Wright and Paul Elam, survey the roots of the chivalric tradition and examine real life examples of chivalry in action.

This book explores the complexity of Iberian identity and multicultural/multi-religious interactions in the Peninsula through the lens of spells, talismans, and imaginative fiction in medieval and early modern Iberia. Focusing particularly on love magic—which manipulates objects, celestial spheres, and demonic conjurings to facilitate sexual encounters—Menaldi examines how practitioners and victims of such magic as represented in major works produced in Castile. Magic, and love magic in particular, is an exchange of knowledge, a claim to power and a deviation from or subversion of the licit practices permitted by authoritative decrees. As such, magic serves as a metaphorical tool for understanding the complex relationships of the Christian with the non-Christian. In seeking to understand and incorporate hidden secrets that presumably reveal how one can manipulate their environment, occult knowledge became one of the funnels through which cultures and practices mixed and adapted throughout the centuries.

Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Literature - Medieval Literature, grade: 1st, University of Chester, course: MA History, language: English, abstract: Using fictional and 'factual' literature, the dissertation attempts to understand the multiplicity of masculinity and individual knightly motivations caused by competing factual and fictional depictions of chivalry. Overall, histories of chivalry and masculinity between c 1350-c 1410 in France have been treated singularly. The ideal qualities of chivalry have been treated as the reality for all-knights, when in fact chivalric ideologies were unique to individuals and overlapped in both factual and fictional literature of the period. Chivalry in the Middle Ages has often been defined as ‘the religious and moral system of behavior that the perfect knight was expected to follow’. However, singular definitions of chivalry should be disregarded because displays of medieval masculinity and chivalry were a complicated mixture of social conditions, institutional influence, and individual motivation.

North and South is a multi-dimensional look at a prevailing theme in current discourse on the concept of borders. This collection of essays invites us to cross historical, regional, and disciplinary boundaries. The contributors consider a range of primary texts, use a number of critical approaches, and make some surprising connections. The borders created by the concepts of “north” and “south” provoke us to ask if the terms continue to represent real divisions, or if usage and habit have drained them of any real meaning. And how have literary texts sought to represent and elucidate the divisions and to complicate and undermine such rigid categories? This collection of essays considers such questions and offers some tentative and original answers. The essays in North and South treat a wide variety of topics, generically and geographically, chronologically and creatively. They interrogate the elusive topic of boundaries symbolic and literal; boundaries as means of communication rather than division; boundaries that create borderlands; boundaries that invite transgression; boundaries that resist erasure. Across and within these boundaries, the theme of identity emerges: international, national, regional, gendered, racial, ethnic.

Gynocentrism, a centuries old term, refers to the principle of female centeredness or female dominance in various social or interpersonal contexts. The term has recently enjoyed a resurgence, serving again as a descriptor of the expanding yet centuries old obsession with the rights, status, and power of women. This book traces the history of that tradition to its roots in medieval society, while being careful to note the difference between benign gynocentric acts and the more problematic examples of gynocentric culture. The essays collected in this volume were originally penned for the website Gynocentrism and its Cultural Origins, and have since been revised for this eBook edition. The essays are grouped into five parts exploring various aspects of gynocentrism, and providing examples of the phenomenon from historical literature. The final part, Post Gynocentric Relationships explores the possibility of relationships built on the notion of friendship as an alternative to neurotic shibboleths of romantic love.