Between Mars and Venus : balance and excess in the chivalry of the late-medieval English romance
Year: 2006
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation is a study of how late-medieval romances construe ideal\nchivalric masculinity, and how aristocratic male violence was integrated into a beneficial\nmodel for masculine behavior. The focus is on the "fair unknown" romances of the late\nfourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and the final chapter reads Chaucer's "Knight's\nTale" as thematically related to the "fair unknown" tradition in its treatment of chivalry\nand violence. By contrasting the masculine ideal of the romance with that of the chivalric\nepic, this study approaches chivalry in terms of multiple and competing models, and finds\nthat, unlike the epic, the ideal of the romance was informed by the growing\npopularization of university-based philosophy and cosmology.\nBetween Mars and Venus argues that the most significant point of departure that\nthe chivalric romance makes from the epic is its characterization of chivalric masculinity\nas a moderated avoidance of extreme behavior. Animalistic and monstrous references to\nknightly violence in the romance often result from episodes in which the knight has been\noverly amorous or courtly. By identifying both extremely amorous and extremelyaggressive behavior in terms of oppositional poles on a spectrum of excess, this study\nreads ideal masculinity as the mediated balance between the two extremes. The\nconnection between the production of romances and the philosophy of the universities\noffers an explanation of chivalric masculinity in terms of Aristotelian virtue - as a mean\nbetween excess and deficiency of prowess. This reading of chivalric violence avoids the\nanachronistic assumptions of stereotypical male aggression that many critics rely on. By\navoiding these assumptions, this dissertation offers a reworking of the\nfeminine/masculine binary into a paradigm of competing masculinities, which is more\nattuned to the intellectual and philosophical contexts of late-medieval literary production.
Author: Ilan Mitchell-Smith
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W387709642