The 2016 Loomis Lecture: Moral Chivalry and the Arthurian Revival

Medieval manuals of chivalry suggest that a moral element is one part of the ideal of chivalry. With the incipient interest in the Middle Ages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some antiquarians sought to justify an interest in chivalry and medieval literature by positing a link between the classical and the medieval; and historians and other authors saw the moral element in chivalry as a model for instructing the young. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in England and America, chivalry came to be looked on as a set of moral qualities available to children and to the common man, not just to noblemen. One consequence of this was that the Arthurian legends were used as a model of virtue for children. The resulting literature and theory about chivalry in turn inspired both major and minor authors and influenced many aspects of popular culture.