Prowess, Piety, and Public Order in Medieval Society: Studies in Honor of Richard W. Kaeuper

by Craig M Nakashian (Editor), Daniel P Franke (Contributor)

Richard Kaeuper's career has examined three salient concerns of medieval society - knightly prowess and violence, lay and religious piety, and public order and government - most directly in three of his War, Justice, and Public Order (Oxford, 1988), Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999), and Holy Warriors (Penn, 2009). Kaeuper approaches historical questions with an eye towards illuminating the inherent complexities in human ideas and ideals, and he has worked to untangle the various threads holding together cultural constructs such as chivalry, licit violence, and lay piety. The present festschrift in his honor brings together scholars from across disciplines to engage with those same concerns in medieval society from a variety of perspectives. Contributors Bernard S. Bachrach, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Samuel A. Claussen, David Crouch, Thomas Devaney, Paul Dingman, Daniel P. Franke, Richard Firth Green, Christopher Guyol, John D. Hosler, William Chester Jordan, Craig M. Nakashian, W. Mark Ormrod, Russell A. Peck, Anthony J. Pollard, Michael Prestwich, Sebastian Rider-Bezerra, Leah Shopkow, and Peter W. Sposato.

436 pages, Hardcover

Published March 2, 2017

Reviews

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skimmed this for a research project. If medieval history is your thing, then you'll enjoy these essays, building on Richard Kaeuper's studies of medieval history and violence. Much of Kaeuper's work hinges on the argument that chivalry, as romanticized by Victorians, obscures the bloody reality of medieval life. Yes, knights talked about chivalry, and they wrote about it in songs, poems, and treatises, but they still went out, killed each other, and glorified the idea of martial prowess. Chivalry did not mean a gentler way of life, as the Victorians imagined the medieval past; rather, chivalry played a central role in and possibly worsened the wars of the middle ages. The contributors take Kaeuper's revisionist interpretation of chivalry as their starting point as they consider how medieval warriors and poets conceived of violence.