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3 - “Are you the only uncivilized knight produced by sweet Britain?”: Arthurian episodes and knightly conduct

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2010

Siân Echard
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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Summary

The full-blown romances discussed in the next few chapters are rarities, and I turn now to another set of rarities, those disjecta membra of the Arthurian tradition which, while they are not freestanding Arthurian stories, nevertheless differ from the direct responses of the historians to the question of Arthur's historicity; or indeed from the direct use of the Arthurian material for chronicle history. In the Arthurian episodes which follow, Latin writers play with Arthurian fictions in the service of works that are not primarily Arthurian in focus. Johannes de Hauvilla and Andreas Capellanus use Arthurian material to illustrate modes of conduct. Hauvilla's Architrenius includes a section in which Gawain leads the army of the just against the army of the covetous. The particular choice of characters here may be attributed to the world of courtly patronage, for in this episode Johannes gives his patron an Arthurian lineage and makes him one with Arthur and Gawain in terms of openhandedness. The Sparrowhawk episode from Andreas Capellanus's De amore uses Arthurian material to present the Rules of Love, and so comes closest of the works in this chapter to echoing the preoccupations of vernacular courtly romance. The final text, an episode from John of Glastonbury's fourteenth-century Cronica sive Antiquitates Glastoniensis Ecclesie, presents a squire who demonstrates how not to behave, as well as a most pious king.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

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