Medieval Knighthood Vol. V [Hardcover]

Studies treating a wide variety of aspects of knighthood. Topics include the way in which the word knight has been used, studying the terminology and ritual concerned with making a knight ; the circumstances and implications of the knighting of the social elite of England between 1066 and 1272; the difficulties of distinguishing between knight and clerk, as exemplified by Abelard's multi-faceted image; the debt which Geoffrey de Charny's treatise on chivalry owes to the ideas and ideals of knighthood in Arthurian prose romances; and the linguistic competence of the twelfth-century knightly classes as courtly audience of troubadour song. There are also important contributions on the warhorse; and on the fortifications of fourteenth-century English towns, arguing that they were more the expression of bourgeois aspirations than a response to serious military threat. Professor STEPHEN CHURCH teaches in the Department of History, University of East Anglia; Dr RUTH HARVEY is lecturer in French, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. Contributors: RICHARD BARBER, MATTHEW BENNETT, JONATHAN BOULTON, MICHAEL CLANCHY, CHARLES COULSON, RUTH HARVEY, ELSPETH KENNEDY, AD PUTTER Cumulatively [the volumes] are of increasing value as repositories of scholarship on the multi-dimensional subject of knighthood ... highly informative and useful. ALBION`The Medieval Warhorse Reconsidered'. - `Geoffroi de Charny's `Livre de Chevalerie' and the Knights of the Round Table - Sylvia Huot (Editor)When is a knight not a knight? - Richard W BarberThe medieval warhorse reconsidered - Matthew BennettClassic kighthood as nobiliary dignity: the knighting of counts and kings' sons in England, 1066-1272 - Jonathan BoultonAbelard: knight (Miles), courtier (Palatinus) and man of war (Vir Bellator)'. - Michael ClanchyBattlements and the bourgeoisie: municipal status and the apparatus of urban defence in later-medieval England'. - Charles CoulsonLanguages, lyrics and the knightly classes - Ruth HarveylÃu