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.