Everyone is familiar with the stock characters of chivalric romance, the
knights in shining armor, fair damsels in distress, gross giants, and
marauding dragons. These stereotypes live on in contemporary television,
movies, and pulp fiction, where they may amount to nothing more than casual
entertainment, but in the culture of the European Middle Ages, which gave them
birth, they were profoundly meaningful. Chivalry, as presented in medieval
literature, envisions the best and the worst of human beings and human life.
To do so, it creates a fantastic mixture of real and imaginary creatures and
adventures, drawing on history, myth, religion, and political thought.
Chivalric adventures can bewilder a modern reader, who is often unable to find
the vital human experience within stories that are, on the surface,
unrealistic, unlikely, even impossible.

In this course students will learn the kinds of questions to ask of medieval
chivalric literature in order to loosen its tongue. For example, when a knight
wandering alone in the forest finds a lion and a serpent locked in mortal
combat, why does he promptly add his strength to that of the lion, though
fearful that the lion may attack him once victorious? Is the serpent simply
another version of the devil in the Garden of Eden? When the same knight later
agrees to fight two villains with his lion tied up on the sidelines, but the
lion breaks loose and rescues the man from sure defeat, is the victory
tarnished by the broken agreement? Is there a higher good that justifies the
breach of rules? Or is the knight not responsible? Does the lion itself "mean"
something? The lyrics of the troubadours, composers and performers of love
songs for the chivalric nobility, take us into the mystique of "courtly love,"
which calls for the man to subordinate himself completely to the woman he
loves. This is one example of the provocative set of gender roles within
chivalry; another is the domineering activity of the man, and mute passivity
of the woman, in stories of arms and warfare. Were relations between men and
women really as unbalanced as the literature suggests?

The power of chivalry to fascinate readers and audiences in the twentieth
century can be seen in huge box office successes such as Disney's animated
film The Sword in the Stone and the Broadway musical Camelot. Both are based
on a group of novels about King Arthur by T.H. White, The Once and Future
King, and this course will conclude with study of a modern interpretation of
the chivalric traditions.

Texts:
(+) G. Burgess (trans.), THE SONG OF ROLAND
(+) J. Gantz (trans.), THE MABINOGION
(+) Gottfried von Strassburg, TRISTAN
(+) Chr‚tien de Troyes, ARTHURIAN ROMANCES
(+) Raffel, SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT