The Book of the Knight of the Tower: Translated by William Caxton

by M.Y. Offord

8vo brown cloth with gilt lettering in dustwrapper. Frontispiece.

364 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1484

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is meant to be a conduct book for the 3 daughters of the Knight of the Tour-Landry, translated into English for a single print run by William Caxton in 1484. Unexpectedly, I found it actually to be a contribution to the ongoing querrelle des femmes. Comprised of exempla culled from chronicles, saints' lives, the author's own personal experiences, and--most shockingly--some pretty explicit fabliaux, the book presents in some ways as a secular, lower-gentry version of Christine de Pisan's Treasury of the City of Ladies, penned not by a professional writer but by the father and a team of four clerks and priests. The book provides descriptions of how women should pray, dress, and conduct themselves in public and at church, alongside numerous examples biblical and contemporary of women behaving badly (Eve, Jezebel, & etc.) and women behaving well. The centerpiece is a dialogue between the knight and his own wife concerning the daughters' relationships with knights; following the idea that a knight in love is spurred to greater feats of arms on her behalf (and seemingly having read either Raymond de Lull or Geoffrey de Charny's book of the order of chivalry) the Knight argues that it is fine for the girls to enter into relationships with their suitors as long as they are fine, upstanding young men with promising futures; the wife argues back that the chivalric ideal is just an ideal, that he knows as well as she that the young mens' words are often only words, that there are too many young men of high position that collect girls and then boast of their "sexploits" to others, and so the girls must, regardless of the honor and prestige of their suitors, carefully guard their reputations at all times. This was the highlight of the book for me; the rest essentially re-hashing of the many collections of virtue-versus-vice stories you find in works like de Mulieribus Cleris and Christine's Treasury.

[Lacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Medieval misogynist morality at its best!