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6. Knight and Horse
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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C h a p t e r 6 Knight and Horse Like Canacee’s relation to the falcon, Gawain’s relation to his warhorse Gringolet and Bevis’s relation to Arondel involve symbolic elevation, compassionate companionship, and moral virtue. The interaction of knight and horse also involves a complexly coordinated material relationship that forms the very foundation of chivalry. Across the medieval written record, the relation of knight and horse is the most densely represented of all cross-species interactions . Yet many publications on the literatures of chivalry make no mention of the horse. I am guilty myself of this neglect: my Performance of Self discusses many aspects of chivalric performance, but barely mentions the place of the horse in chivalric identity.1 To be sure, a vast edifice of social and religious principles takes shape around knighthood in this period, an edifice whose component parts can each lay claim to the term “chivalry.” But as Noel Denholm -Young puts the historical situation, “it is impossible to be chivalrous without a horse.”2 Malory’s Sir Lamorak shares this view of chivalry’s sine qua non: “What is a knight but whan he is on horsebacke?”3 This chapter delineates the chivalric performance at its etymological and conceptual core—the relationship of fighting man and horse. Knighthood is first of all an embodied performance, a mastering of techniques and technologies that produce the chevalier, the ritter, the cavallero as one who undertakes adventures and combats mounted on a horse. Characterizations of what it is to be “on horsebacke” vacillate intriguingly between two poles on the broad field of chivalric representation. Sometimes the assemblage of armed knight and horse is presented as a mechanism coordinating multiple bodies and technologies, and sometimes instead as a partnership that attributes courage, nobility, and initiative to both knight and horse. These two versions of knight and horse interpenetrate in many sources. Separating the mechanistic from the interspecies version is not truly accurate 138 Chapter 6 to chivalric thinking, but my discussion will force them apart sufficiently to explore their different stakes and implications. In this chapter’s two central examples, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale seems to produce a fully technologized horse; conversely, the Auchinleck manuscript’s Bevis of Hampton stresses the affective bond between horse and knight: Bevis spends years winning back his heritage only to give it up again to save the life of his horse. Yet each of these works draws on the full contradictory range of chivalric thought. Both versions of the horse, the mechanistic and the companionate, contribute to presenting knighthood as a privileged status; together their very contradictions envelop in mystery this most fundamental component of knighthood, the relation of knight and horse, protecting it from easy apprehension and critique. From their differing perspectives, romances, manuals of chivalry, treatises on the horse, and records of breeding and armory provide glimpses of how chivalric milieus understood the interrelation of arms, knight, and horse. Some of my sources consider living equines more fully than their social significations , while other sources consider the horse in more imaginative and figurative terms. For recovering the encounter of horse and knight, it is necessary to take into account both the conceptual field of “noble” and “loyal” horses and that field’s material correlatives in the embodied practices of chivalry. The relationship of material practices to conceptions is never simple, but practice is never external to conception, nor does conception float entirely free from materiality. Language and abstract thought can only partly apprehend a crossspecies relationship; the physical and practical dimensions of the experience intertwine with its intellectual components. The forces, creatures, and techniques coordinated in chivalry come together through a premodern process of self-definition. This process, as I have argued at length in The Performance of Self, resonates more intriguingly with postmodern conceptions of selfhood than with the autonomous, clearly bounded individual of modernity. In the medieval subculture of chivalry, winning honor (pris, los, worship, honour, renoun) contributes crucially to defining the self. Chivalric identity resides in performance and its judgment by one’s peers. In deeds of chivalry, the knight strives to be enhanced by his weapons and warhorse—to take up more space, in every sense, than he could without them. The ideal chivalric figure coordinates horse and arms in a mobile performance of identity that is not required, as was the modern self, to declare its independence from the material and social world surrounding it. The commingled presence of knight...