Aims
The term “knight” has been used for over a millennium to describe a particular elite their behaviour and ethics, yet knighthood was not static and altered to reflect political and cultural changes. This course examines the changing nature of knighthood during the medieval and early modern periods and how it was re-envisioned by Victorian and 20th century popular imagination. Tournaments, an essential component of knighthood, also changed from practise for war, to ritualised chivalric displays.
This course will explore the origins of tournaments, the reasons why they changed and the equipment needed. The use of tournaments as mechanisms of political control by medieval and early modern monarchs will also be explored, and how tournaments have been reinterpreted as entertainment in the 19th and 20th centuries. The course will also explore the changing nature of chivalry, the impact of courtly love literature, and chivalry’s reinvention in the Victorian period as a gentleman’s code of honour.
Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:
- Understand the reasons why knighthood, chivalry and tournaments developed, changed, declined and were reinvented within the contexts of different time-periods.
- Identity, assess and evaluate key turning points, significant events and individuals in these changes
- Critically evaluate contemporary source material- textual, images and artefacts
- Critically evaluate historical articles and deconstruct popular reconstructions and reinterpretations
The Seminars
After week one, each session will begin with a class discussion of the key issues raised in the reading for that week. Then the key questions and themes of the reading for the next week will be introduced by the tutor.
- Week 1 :What was a knight? Anglo-Saxon Cnihts and Norman Knights
- Week 2: The Feudal or Godly Knight? Richard I and the Crusades.
- Week 3: Early Tournaments and Chivalry – William Marshal the “greatest knight”?
- Week 4: Knights’ Ladies and Love- courtly love literature and the expectations of a knight
- Week 5: Chivalric Secular Orders –Edward III and the Garter, the Fleece and the Dragon
- Week 6: Who then was the Knight? Heraldry and the rise of the gentry
- Week 7: The Decline of Chivalry in the later Medieval period?
- Week 8: Tudor Chivalry and Tournaments
- Week 9: Jacobean Tournaments and Masques
- Week 10: The Victorian Medieval Revival and the Eglinton tournament
- Week 11:Re-inventing the Knight? Modern reinterpretations
Assessment
Formative assessment set around week 6, usually an essay plan. Feedback is given on the essay plan.
Summative assessment at the conclusion of the course. This will be a 2,000 word essay.
Suggested Initial Reading List
Other texts will form part of the reading list for the course. These are background texts:
- Anglo, Sydney, Spectacle, pageantry, and early Tudor Policy (Clarendon Press, 1969)
- Barber, Richard, The Reign of Chivalry (Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2005)
- Girouard, Mark, The return to Camelot : chivalry and the English gentleman (1981)
- Saul, Nigel, Age of chivalry : art and society in late medieval England, (Brockhampton Press: London, 1995)
- Young, Alan, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments. (London: George Philip, 1987)