Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe

Rating:
Summary: the full monty
Review: I've taken a couple of Prof. Kaeuper's courses, and I got what I expected in this book. I can't speak for professional historians, but I can say that his style accomodates those less familiar with the time period. Indeed, you might find it to be kind of a grind at first, because the emphsais is on strict historical evidence rather than on any prevailing romantic notions about chivalry. This often dissapoints beginning students in this area, but I gurantee that the energy put in leaves one far more gratified. The reader can get a clear sense that the "Dark Ages" were immensely complex and active, and that this thing we call "chivalry" is essential to Western history -even the Western present- and is by no means something people did just so we can watch nifty movies.

Rating:
Summary: the full monty
Review: I've taken a couple of Prof. Kaeuper's courses, and I got what I expected in this book. I can't speak for professional historians, but I can say that his style accomodates those less familiar with the time period. Indeed, you might find it to be kind of a grind at first, because the emphsais is on strict historical evidence rather than on any prevailing romantic notions about chivalry. This often dissapoints beginning students in this area, but I gurantee that the energy put in leaves one far more gratified. The reader can get a clear sense that the "Dark Ages" were immensely complex and active, and that this thing we call "chivalry" is essential to Western history -even the Western present- and is by no means something people did just so we can watch nifty movies.

Rating:
Summary: How knights thought about knighthood
Review: Readers who enjoyed Maurice Keen's fine book *Chivalry* may well want to read this book, which approaches the same question, "What is chivalry?" from a somewhat different angle.

Kaeuper, who has long been interested in the question of public order in the later Middle Ages, argues in this book that it is a mistake to look at chivalry as an ideal which had only a positive impact. Yes, indeed, knights often fought to uphold law and religion, and believed it was their duty to do so; at the same time, knights believed they had an inherent right to exercise violence in whatever cause they chose, and sometimes for no other reason than to defend their own prickly honor.

In other words, chivalry was a troublesome and ambiguous ideal, as much problem as solution.

To illustrate this, Kaeuper takes the reader on a fascinating tour of all kinds of medieval chivalric literature. All of it, he says, was reformist in nature, even the romances which were primarily meant to entertain. But reform could mean many things: knights should control their violence; or, knights should remember that they are fighters first.

The best part of this book is the masterly way Kaeuper allows us to see all the different ways medieval writers and their audiences thought about knighthood. It is quite an achievement.