Knights at Court: courtliness, chivalry, and courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance (review)

168 Reviews dated, nevertheless, Anglophone scholars owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Rosener and to his translator. Michael J. Bennett History Department University of Tasmania Scaglione, Aldo, Knights at Court: courtliness, chivalry, and courtesy from Ottoman Germany to the Italian Renaissance, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford, University of California Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xi, 489; 24 plates; R.R.P. US$45.00. The paradoxes implicit in the theory and practice of courtly behaviour in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance have always posed a problem to the historian and, to a lesser extent, to the literary critic. Professor Scaglione, who has occupied three prestigious chairs of Italian at Berkeley, Chapel Hill, and N e w York, brings a remarkable breadth of cross-disciplinary erudition to his multi-disciplinary subject. Although literarytexts,from the eleventh to the seventeenth century, are at the heart of all his sustained arguments, he approaches his texts with a remarkable degree of pragmatism, specifically refusing to follow the dictates of any fashionable critical trend. Moreover, he is both abreast of and sympathetic towards the work of historians such as Maurice Keen or Georges Duby, and specifically develops the brand of sociological approach with which Norbert Elias transformed our views of manners and courtliness. Elias has been a conceptual pivot for studies of court societies. Scaglione's book does not replace Elias's but it is n o w an indespensible comlement By treating of Germany, France, and Italy almost exclusively, Knights at court follows in the Elias tradition of Eurocentric scholarhsip, but like Elias, Scaglione has expanded the reading available in English to give the English-speaking student welcome doses of non-Anglocentricity. H e quotes very liberally from his sources in then original languages but usually adds a translation or a construe. The sentiments of those who became in some sense knights at court live in this wealth of citation. 'In its broadest form', Scaglione claims, 'my theme is the literary and cultural role of the European nobility in the sense of a convergence of two distinct occasionally opposite functions: the warrior ethic versus the ethic of courtliness and courtesy'. The three 'separate yet coexistent codes', the courtly, the chivahic-cum-heroic, and the chivahic-cum-courtois, were at Reviews 169 then greatest tension in the formative period of the courtly ethos, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and at then weakestresolutionin the early m o d e m absolutist state anatomized so brilliantly by Elias. The epic, the romance, the love lyric do not simply equate with separate codes, least of all the love lyric. The genres, moreover, evolved in rather different ways in Provence, Germany, and northern France, reflecting differences of aristocratic social structure. Comparing troubadour poety and minnesang, Scaglione goes beyond the superficial standard explanation that the minnesang 'was the creation of a higher nobility, hence not possibly polemical against it' and sees, surely correctiy, that 'the reason for the differences is the greater stability of court life and family relations as well as the infrequency of knights errant (vagantes) in German lands'. Similiarly Scgalione has a bracing approach to the old and vital question of woman's place in courtly love and lyric. Building on a splendid analysis of one of the most remarkable lyrics of Guilhelm IX of Aquitane about the lady he had never seen yet loves heartily (Anc non la vi et am la fort), he postulates 'the unreality of the woman's presence in medieval literature, even whUe she is, conversely, the centre of attention of much of the literary and artistic discourse'. W o m a n is, not only to Guilhelm IX, 'the knight's chivalric and courteous self and the list of virtues and adjectives 'attributed to the courtly w o m a n is more or less the same as for the man'. Was the courtly w o m a n an image of Narcissus? This is a major book with a dazzling series of thought-provoking insights throughout the text and in the fascinating endnotes. Everyone concerned with the cultural flowering of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance should read Aldo Scaglione. R. Ian Jack Department of History University of Sydney Seaward...