This dissertation is a study of how late-medieval romances construe ideal
chivalric masculinity, and how aristocratic male violence was integrated into a beneficial
model for masculine behavior. The focus is on the "fair unknown" romances of the late
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and the final chapter reads Chaucer's "Knight's
Tale" as thematically related to the "fair unknown" tradition in its treatment of chivalry
and violence. By contrasting the masculine ideal of the romance with that of the chivalric
epic, this study approaches chivalry in terms of multiple and competing models, and finds
that, unlike the epic, the ideal of the romance was informed by the growing
popularization of university-based philosophy and cosmology.
Between Mars and Venus argues that the most significant point of departure that
the chivalric romance makes from the epic is its characterization of chivalric masculinity
as a moderated avoidance of extreme behavior. Animalistic and monstrous references to
knightly violence in the romance often result from episodes in which the knight has been
overly amorous or courtly. By identifying both extremely amorous and extremelyaggressive behavior in terms of oppositional poles on a spectrum of excess, this study
reads ideal masculinity as the mediated balance between the two extremes. The
connection between the production of romances and the philosophy of the universities
offers an explanation of chivalric masculinity in terms of Aristotelian virtue - as a mean
between excess and deficiency of prowess. This reading of chivalric violence avoids the
anachronistic assumptions of stereotypical male aggression that many critics rely on. By
avoiding these assumptions, this dissertation offers a reworking of the
feminine/masculine binary into a paradigm of competing masculinities, which is more
attuned to the intellectual and philosophical contexts of late-medieval literary production.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/3941 |
| Date | 16 August 2006 |
| Creators | Mitchell-Smith, Ilan |
| Contributors | Wollock, Jennifer |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | 537587 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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