Conduct, Habitus and Practice

In this chapter the context in social history is set out, with a particular consideration of the value of the insights of Pierre Bourdieu and how they might be applied to change in medieval society. The historiographical context of the emergence of the idea of Chivalry as a social change within an existing habitus follows from this, and the way the idea colonized the national historiographies of Europe after its first articulation in the Enlightenment. The chapter explains how it is that the Enlightenment and the present day are able to approach the contemporary medieval social mind because its aristocracy as much as its clerical elite was an educated and literate one, and quite how pervasive its use and appreciation of literate forms was.