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  • Holy Warriors. The Religious Ideology of Chivalry
  • David Crouch
Holy Warriors. The Religious Ideology of Chivalry. By Richard W. Kaeuper. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 331. $59.95.

Richard Kaeuper’s latest work is best seen as a follow-up to his earlier study, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999). It pursues a question that its predecessor raised. Deploying a rare knowledge of the romance sources, Professor Kaeuper projected a compelling vision of medieval knights caught between two imperatives: to compete among themselves and demonstrate their prowess, and to use their accumulated honor and status to impose on the world around them. Kaeuper emphasized the essential moral autonomy of the knight in society and the free recourse to violence that he employed. He argued also that chivalry was a coherent ideology that spanned the later medieval centuries and was a constant and disruptive factor in its society. Naturally such a force must encounter other competing forces, notably that of national kingship, founded on the preservation of civil peace, and even more crucially, that of the Church, an institution that drew its basic ideology from the Sermon on the Mount. It is to this latter intellectual conflict that Professor Kaeuper returns in the present volume.

The result is equally impressive. Kaeuper’s knowledge of the vernacular romance sources in both French and German is comprehensive and thorough; it takes in the entire period from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. But to this he adds a close reading of scholastic theology on the subject of violence and the knight, garnished richly by hagiography, sermon exempla, and miracula. The scholarship on display is carried lightly on the current of Kaeuper’s accessible and friendly prose. It is only when one is drawn to the footnotes that one sees quite how deeply his mind has delved in search of the medieval mentality he endeavors to reveal and explore. The University of Pennsylvania Press should be congratulated in its willingness to provide the author with almost unlimited space to lay out his scholarly apparatus in the end notes. It adds to the book’s authority and is a mine of information for other scholars in its own right. The result does the press great credit.

The purpose of the book is a quest for a medieval hermeneutic between a nonviolent gospel that exalted the poor and a military class that honored that gospel yet whose conduct was founded on violent endeavor and display. In his basic ideas, Kaeuper does not go further in this than in his earlier study, but he brings into play here a massive battery of learning with which to illustrate his points. He stresses once again the autonomy of the knight, and it is that moral independence that brings him to characterize knighthood as willing to accept only so much of the Church’s teaching. He sees knights as themselves capable of [End Page 540] framing a hermeneutic. They are willing to accept the heroic elements of faith: martyred, military saints; the suffering of Christ; the heroic ascesis of the knight who embraces “the glory of suffering,” forswears luxury and family, and goes off into the wilds. Most important of all for them was, of course, the heroic self-giving represented by the Crusade, the Church’s own solution to the moral problem of a Christian military aristocracy. For Kaeuper, knightly religious rhetoric was simply therefore Christianized prowess. Chivalry thus jousts with the Evangelists in a true tournament of the Antichrist, and if one pursues the imagery, the angels must have wept at Chivalry’s triumph.

The author’s central task is to establish what this “new lay theology” was all about. On the way, he provides some very valuable reflections on crusade and its literary mirrors, the pseudocrusades of the Arthurian quests and the Saracen wars of the Carolingian epic. The discussion of the theological Three Orders scheme of society significantly extends earlier studies on the theme, providing a much longer time frame than has customarily been the case, caught up as scholars have been with its implications for the society of the year 1000. Kaeuper has also taken...

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