Knightly Fables, Visual Concepts: On the Affinity Between Chivalry and Bourgeoisie

For Bernard Harcourt and Mia Ruyter

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The knightly fable is a source of social and political hopes among knights. It was present in dozens of medieval and early modern narratives, and in it a knight will become a knight after he—as masculinity is paramount in the knightly fable—has been removed from all his earthly certainties. The reasons for this removal include political conspiracy, war, a curse, or an accident: they involve the loss of land, family, a horse, all his horses, or lineage, the very origins of the knight. Yet, by means of the physical, political, legal, and ethical prowess that texts normally include under the general concept of virtue, the knight will become somebody else as the result of combining everything he lost with the new and more important, more durable and meaningful things he obtained. He will sometimes get a new name, a new lineage, a new family, or brand new origins, better than those he lost.¹ Some names that articulate this kind of fable: Lancelot in the Lancelot en prose; Erec in Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec; Renaut de Beaujeau’s Li Biaus Desconneüs; Tirant lo Blanc in Joanot Martorell’s masterwork; Amadís de Gaula in Rodrigo Díaz de Montalvo’s successful recast; Galahad in La queste del saint Graal; Zifar in his Libro, among others.²

The previous paragraph may suggest that the knightly fable is a narrative structure, a combination of narrative motifs like the ones collected by Anti Aarne and Stith Thompson.³ I would rather argue that the structure is only a vehicle for the central thesis of the knightly fable, what I have called the social and political hope—that is, the idea that from loss, exile, and certain kinds of education, knighthood can endow an individual with territory, material wealth, and power.

The line of inquiry raised by the knightly fable is not to simply put forth that there is a social hope, but, rather, to build a concrete social hope with concrete political purposes. The social hope of a novel like the fourteenth-century Libro del Cavallero Zifar focuses on the succession of the pre-existing kingdom of Menton and the fulfillment of a destiny, whereas the thesis of Amadís de Gaula entails the theorization of an imaginary political entity characterized by insularity and idealist politics, a knightly way of exercising power—the Ínsula Firme.⁴

The main question raised in the knightly fable is: what can one do with chivalry? This question is central to the theorization of knighthood. Even when they look at alternative ideas about knighthood, scholars traditionally focus on noble, clerical, and monarchical texts dealing with knighthood from the top down. Each of these versions of knighthood shares the same perspective on what the purpose of chivalry is for those who already participate in chivalry and knightly discourse—that is, from the vantage point of nobility. In these cases, political-theologies may enter into conflict with more secular, politicized, or centralized ideas of jurisdiction, but they all leave untouched the core assumption that between chivalry and nobility there is a relation of affinity, and that objective power is founded on nobility as a synchronic as much as a diachronic category. This assumed affinity is what glues together the apparatus-like concepts and practices of knighthood from the Middle Ages to today.⁵

Whether considering these differences or not, scholarship on chivalry frequently combines the many differences within the trope of noble chivalry into another very powerful structural idea of knighthood, oftentimes called “knightly spirit,” or “the knightly code,” or even “the courtly code.” This idea of chivalry is highly codified, and this codification is also part of an apparatus of power that tends to underscore the centrality of nobility and its particular ethics—an imaginary that has spanned centuries and cultures.⁶

In this apparatus, lineage is an ever renewable historical device that assures the self-replication, the autopoesis of nobility; independently of periods of concealment or disappearance, loss of political presence or influence...