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.