The Enemy

In a society as competitive as that of the medieval European elite, defence from open and concealed enemies was a matter of survival. Self-control was paramount as it was proverbial that a man was his own worst enemy. As a result, mitigating the effects of anger, rather than indulging it, was predominant in medieval conduct literature, contrary to some analyses of the medieval mentality. It was the young male which medieval society most feared as likely to disrupt society by his lack of self-control. Most feared of all was the rival courtier whose pleasant and flattering demeanour concealed an implacable and covert enemy (the losenger) conspiring at a rival’s overthrow. When open hostility broke out, medieval societies structured animosity into a framework called mortal enmity, which allowed its worst effects to be mitigated and not spill over to blood feud.

The Chivalric Virus

The final chapter and conclusion of the book validates the Enlightenment idea of chivalric knighthood—a shared explanation of superior behaviour which emerged into the full consciousness of medieval people around the beginning of the thirteenth century, but places it in a new context, as superseding an earlier shared explanation of superior conduct, weakened by the internal contradictions of courtly culture. It places the nexus point between societies as the Angevin-Flemish courts of the 1170s and 1180s, where knighthood was exalted as the mainspring of their princes’ social prestige. Consideration is given to non-cultural reasons for the weakness of Courtliness, particularly princely aggression against their aristocracies.

The Insurgent Woman

Conduct literature concerning women is frequently adversarial and assumes women are trying to escape male control, and it can range from casually misogynistic to the extreme anti-feminism of clerical tracts. Since European society allowed woman a social role in court and hall and interchange was common between sexes in public, intersexual relations were a major stress point in courtly society, and conduct literature directed at women in society was extensive. Tracts identify the dangers of social interchange, not least the narcissism and predatory nature of male behaviour. Defences were available to vulnerable women in dress, in limiting access, and in the model of the preudefemme, while a new one of ostentatious hyper-religiosity grew up as a response to the emerging masculine hypermorality of Chivalry.

The Preudefemme

Less prominent in conduct literature, but not invisible, was the female counterpart of the preudomme, the preudefemme (MHG biderbe wip). She operated in the same way in defining gender expectations within the habitus, though in a different way: she was more defensively crafted for women exposed to public life, where they could not themselves be careerists achieving reputation. Loss of reputation was the gender concern of women. The preudefemme likewise has not been to date used by gender historians, surprisingly in view of the considerable amount of twelfth- and thirteenth-century tracts by men attempting to define her, used here for the first time in most cases.

The Preudomme

Gender expectations were a major part of the medieval social habitus, and they were conveyed by an idealized superior male (called in French a preudomme, in German the biderbe man), a concept applied across the social spectrum to laity and clergy alike and the subject of conduct manuals. The preudomme offers in fact a contemporary and widely accepted European medieval definition of masculinity, so far ignored by gender historians. He was very much crafted to assist success in courtly society. This chapter defines and analyses the concept and offers a new avenue into the study of medieval gender which to date has concentrated on data drawn from clerical sources.

The Origins of Cortesia

Superior conduct before the chivalric turn was defined across Europe as something called Courtliness (Lat. curialitas, Fr. courtoisie, Occ./It. cortesia, MHG Hofzuht). Using the early twelfth-century literature of Occitania and England, the chapter establishes it to be then well understood amongst the laity and taught across Europe in elite households (not just those of kings and princes) and considers how far back such lay conduct fit for the court might be found. A case can be made that it was already a pan-European phenomenon by 1000, which partly explains how it was so widespread by 1100. The chapter argues, in contradiction to earlier work, that it was a habitus generated within the aristocracy and taught to youth within its halls, not devised by a civilizing Church from classical models.

The Noble Knight

The knight was included within the origin myth of Nobility by 1210, which was an elevation that depended on defining knights by the hypermoral expectations of their Nobility of Mind. The knight had moral expectations laid on him already in the early twelfth century, but by the end of the century these were intensifying to include the same moral expectations laid on anyone claiming to be noble. This can be traced in the 1180s through the appearance of two grades of knighthood—that of banneret being the nobler, and the rise of the genre of chivalric tract—the origins of both being traceable to the courtly society dominated by Philip of Flanders and the sons of Henry II of England. Simultaneously, literature stigmatized mercenary knights and bourgeois knights as beyond the bounds of noble knighthood. The sacralization of the sword the knight bore was another tactic to raise the order.

The Conspiracy of Deference

Nobility was a concept that came under urgent scrutiny as the chivalric turn was happening. It was in 1100 an ill-defined concept linked in the classical tradition to ‘superiority’ and in the Isidorian tradition to ‘notability’: so a man could be noble, and so could his horse. It included the idea of noble blood and descent, however, which demanded social deference to the supposed possessor and justified his hegemony. As the elite of European society changed at the end of the twelfth century, possession of Nobility became more urgent to individuals (like knights) who needed the deference it demanded to assist their membership of the elite. A binary debate began in the schools pitting the Aristotelian idea of Nobility of Mind against the embedded vernacular sense of Nobility of Blood, which the schools settled in favour of the former, but which elite society repudiated by a mixture of contorted theology and history, an origin myth.

Villeins, Villains and Vilonie

Medieval society had ways of reinforcing social boundaries. Cortoisie as superior conduct was further defined by the literary concept of Vilonie, its dark opposite. The character of the ‘villain’ was a teaching aid designed to stigmatize people whose behaviour conflicted with the habitus. Unfortunately for the agricultural labourer, the same word became the usual term for a peasant, a grim irony which added to the developing exclusivity of the noble classes and their courtly environment. It was deployed to curb the social rise of the rich bourgeoisie, perceived as a threat to the courtly habitus in the later twelfth century.

The Field of Study

The field of study is explained here as Latin Europe, housing a continent-wide culture rising above its several vernaculars: ‘a vast area geared to cultural interchange’. The chapter maps how people and social ideas could readily cross cultures in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by means of a highly mobile elite with a common culture, practising fosterage of its male children across borders and seas. Its Latin conduct literature is one symptom of this, principally intended for the school room, which created a European-wide emphasis on moral issues in conduct since it took classical handbooks as its pattern. However, by contrast and largely unused by social historians is the vernacular conduct literature produced by and for the same aristocrats and their households, whose extent and genres are explored here. The question of the chivalric turn within these literary genres is presented and defined.