Re: disc: ONE Peerage, Different Orders, or No Order (fwd)

[clevin@ripco.com (Craig Levin)]

Poster: clevin@ripco.com (Craig Levin)

Lord Liefr:
> Lord Pedro,
> > 
> > I dunno. Gautier's work on chivalry, though partially tainted
> > with _revanchisme_ (more or less to be expected from a vet of the
> > Franco-Prussian War), relied heavily on them. The romances set a
> > pattern of behavior, and, in a way, became a sort of "Bible" to
> > the "cult of chivalry," to use Maurice Keen's terms. In fact,
> > given the overlap of romance and biography in such works as Petit
> > Jehan de Saintre, the Life of the Unconquerable Don Pero Nino,
> > and biographies of the Black Prince and his contemporary,
> > Warwick, it's kind of hard to say whether art was imitating life,
> > or the other way around!
> 
> I am trying to decide whether to concede your point...
> 
> ...but just this instead.  Is the model for a real knight not William (the) 
> Marshal, who made his fortune fighting tourneys and ably served Henry II, 
> Richard and John?  It is certainly hard to argue against Don Pero Nino, 
> having quoted him (I believe it was him anyway) in a poem I once wrote.  
> But the fact is that late period Chivalry (that is, the collection of 
> knights) was reaching back to an ideal just as we are in the Society.  

I would say that anyone expecting to find a standard model for
the ideal knight over the approximately five and a half centuries
in which the cult of chivalry had some sort of hold over the
European mind needs to lie down and try not to think about "silly
EEEnglish kinniggits" for a while. :-)

It is true that most romances start out with a lament for the
passing of the "good old days of chivalry." However, this seems
to be a standard opener, from Chretien de Troyes to Spenser.
There's a colleague of mine who takes the directly opposite
angle: the height of the cult of chivalry wasn't in the days of
the Crusades, but, rather, the end of the Middle Ages!

> In the end, it gets down to that joke:
> 
> 1.  We are recreating the knighthood of the Great Knights like William 
> Marshal,
> 
> 2.  No!  we are recreating the knights of the late middle ages recreating 
> the Great Knights like William Marshal,
> 
> 3.  No, no!  We are recreating the Victorians recreating the tourneys of 
> the knights of the late middle ages recreating the Great Knights like 
> William Marshal,
> 
> 4.  No, no, no!  We are recreating a group of Berkeley students 
> recreating a group of Victorians recreating the tourneys fo the knights 
> of the late middle ages recreating the great knights like William Marshal.

<Shrug> With 20 thousand people in this club, who can say?

As a herald, am I:

1) Recreating the itinerant and dirt poor tourney groupie? [Given
that I'm a dirt poor grad student, I can do one, but not the
other.]

2) The private herald on somebody's payroll, who has created a
ficticious history of his profession that more or less eliminates
no. 1?

3) The English royal Tudor-era herald, who is, more or less, a
bureaucrat in a tabard? [As one of Laurel's minions (tm), I
guess.]

4) Or those very same Berkelyites' idea of one of the above?
-- 
http://pages.ripco.com:8080/~clevin/index.html 
clevin@ripco.com
Craig Levin
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