Choice Review

By studying and citing medieval works about chivalry--histories, romances, chansons, songs--Kaeuper (Univ. of Rochester) argues that the people of the Middle Ages had no single theoretical or practical image of what chivalry was. Obviously there was a problem of violence in society, but was chivalry an answer to that violence or its cause? Were knights the backbone of the armies relied on by the evolving monarchical states or were they an obstacle to be overcome in the establishment of modern national armies? Were knightly armies the instruments of the Church to be used against the enemies of the Church, or were they a threat to the continued existence of the poor and the weak whose protector the Church claimed to be? Kaeuper contends that there was no agreement among medieval authors about the meaning of chivalry. He asserts that this ambiguity is the result of wide-ranging social and economic changes associated with the appearance of an identifiable noble class (on the Continent) and the challenge to it by bourgeois and other classes, who eventually enter the higher estate through wealth or influence and submerged the chivalric features of former knights. Lower-division undergraduate through graduate level. K. F. Drew; Rice University