David Crouch

Jeroen Deploige

In popular imagination few phenomena are as strongly associated with medieval society as knighthood and chivalry. At the same time, and due to a long tradition of differing national perspectives and ideological assumptions, few phenomena have continued to be the object of so much academic debate. In this volume leading scholars explore various aspects of knightly identity, taking into account both commonalities and particularities across Western Europe. Knighthood and Society in the High Middle Ages addresses how, between the eleventh and the early thirteenth centuries, knighthood evolved from a set of skills and a lifestyle that was typical of an emerging elite habitus, into the basis of a consciously expressed and idealised chivalric code of conduct. Chivalry, then, appears in this volume as the result of a process of noble identity formation, in which some five key factors are distinguished: knightly practices, lineage, crusading memories, gender roles, and chivalric didactics.

Knighthood and Society in the High Middle Ages

Gita Deneckere

The power of monarchs has traditionally been as much symbolic as actual, rooted in popular imagery of sovereignty, divinity, and authority. In Mystifying the Monarch, a distinguished group of contributors explores the changing nature of that imagery—and its political and social effects—in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present day. They demonstrate that, rather than a linear progression where perceptions of rulers moved inexorably from the sacred to the banal, in reality the history of monarchy has been one of constant tension between mystification and demystification.

Jeroen Deploige

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