Richard W. Kaeuper

Kaeuper's Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe is enlightening as to the development as well as the demise of the ideals that made up knighthood in the Middle Ages. He claims that chivalric ideology thrived in a culture of rampant asceticism even in the face of opposition from the church for knighthood's questionable occupation of supposedly God-ordained violence. Knights used religious debate among clerics to their advantage, picking and choosing those beliefs that best suited their vocation and legitimized their claims that they purchased redemption from Hell and purgatorial suffering through enacting their noble and ascetic labor as warriors. Kaeuper's examples from French and British medieval literature, both from sermons and chivalric literature, make for entertaining reading while at the same time illustrating his points. Kaeuper problematizes the demise of chivalry, but ultimately attributes the death of chivalric values in the rising strength of sovereignty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the waning authority of the church.… (meer)