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War by Other Means: Marriage and Chivalry in Chaucer Anne Middleton University ofCalifornia, Berkeley In spite of the care taken on all hands to keep up the illusion of chivalry, reality perpetually gives the lie to it, and obliges it to take refuge in the domains of literature and of conversation. -Johan Huizinga1 By yoking mani,g, to ,hivafry in Chaum-joining on, wachorn, oftraditional thematic criticism to another equally venerable-it is not my intent to make them pull a substantialassertionabout Chaucer's ownviews on either matter. My teme is a more modest and tentative one. By considering a few examples of the "metaphorics" of chivalry, to use Gombrich's term, drawn from the age of Chaucer, I hope to show how we may understand three Canterbury tales-the Knight's, the Squire's, and the Franklin's-as variations on chivalric themes. In these three tales Chaucer's examination ofchivalry is in fact a meditation on the means of representing it-on some common figures for chivalric virtue and on chivalric legend and ceremony as the arts of making appearances. It has been commonplace at least sinceJohan Huizinga, and as recently as Barbara Tuchman, to think oflate-medieval chivalry as making virtually nothing but appearances. Moreover, these appearances are defined as deceptive, evasions rather than expressions ofthe most important truths about this culture. Viewed from a vantage point just after the Great War, the gleam ofits richly elaborated surfaces becomes the cold phosphorescent glow ofa dying or dead order; its intricate ceremonies betray and compen­ sate for a decline of primal vigor in its social ideals and an attentuated significance in its symbols. Historians have quarreled with Huizinga's 1 Johan Huizinga, The Waning a/the MiddleAges(1924; reprint, NewYork: Doubleday, 1954), p. 101. 119 RECONSTRUCTING CHAUCER interpretations of medieval social fact and social theory, but they have rarely addressed directly his fundamental axioms about the representation and interpretation of cultures. These involve the assumption that play and fiction both express ideals and conceal the "real."2 For Huizinga, culture depends on this gap-on the perpetual worldly inefficacy of play and fiction either to represent or to transform the real: what makes a "high" culture is the quality of its beautiful lies. What is left out of this Hegelian paradigm is the possibility that social fictions may proclaim and enact cultural truths, "making" rather than replacing them. Yet that is the relation of "game" to "ernest" suggested by chivalric representation in the age of Chaucer. Whatever became of chivalry in the later Middle Ages-and there seems to be general agreement that there were changes, however one interprets them-had chiefly to do with the virtual absence of crusading as a funda­ mental objective from the center of national military enterprise, while it remained central to the self-rationalizing activities of warriors. Other campaignsand policiescontinuedto beenshrinedas "worthy" byreference to-and as if directed toward-this traditional raison d'etre of high­ medieval knighthood. The conquest of the Holy Land had long furnished the idealizing figures for the customs of the military class and for its importance to Christian society as a whole, and continued to do so, without irony, and with undiminished imaginative force. A famous example of the condensed argument implicit in the continued valorization of crusade is well known to Chaucerians, because its most spectacular effect-the appearance of a barge seeming to float into a royal banqueting hall as if by magic-is mentioned in The Franklin's Tale as an instance of the impressive theatrical illusion that "thise subtil tregetours" can create. 3 This performance, part of an entertainment at a banquet for Emperor Charles IV by his nephew Charles V of France inJanuary, 1378, was a dramatized portrayal of the First Crusade. A whole-page illustration in a manuscript of the Grandes Chroniques de France preserves the specta­ cle to us, and the chronicler has no doubt about the meaning it was to conveyto the spectators from the point of view of its royal sponsor, Charles V: "It seemed to him that in the presence of the greatest men in Christen­ dom, no greater deed could be recalled, or held up as...

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