Chivalric Turn: Conduct and Hegemony in Europe Before 1300

The Chivalric Turn examines the medieval obsession with defining and practising superior conduct, and the social consequences that followed from it. Historians since the seventeenth century have tended to understand medieval conduct through the eyes of the writers of the Enlightenment, viewing superior conduct as 'knightly' behaviour, and categorising it as chivalry.

Using, for the first time, the full range of the considerable twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature on conduct in the European vernaculars and in Latin, The Chivalric Turn describes and defines what superior lay conduct was in European society before chivalry, and maps how and why chivalry emerged and redefined superior conduct in the last generation of the twelfth century. The emergence of chivalry was only one part of a major social change, because it changed how people understood the concept of nobility, which had consequences for the medieval understanding of gender, social class, violence, and the limits of law.


Author: David Crouch
Publisher: Oxford Univ PR
Published: 08/07/2019
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.65lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.00w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780198782940

About the Author
David Crouch, Professor of Medieval History, University of Hull

David Crouch is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Hull.