So the adolescent Arthur Conan–Doyle is characterised by Julian Barnes, and his youthful infatuation with the chivalric universe demonstrates the ways in which it could grip the imaginations of its devotees. Its peerless cast, each boasting a superlative purview (none so brave, none so virtuous and none so fair), establishes the Round Table as the fixed point against which future knights, courts, and quests will be measured. It has an innate nostalgia, set in the wistfully conjured (‘long–gone, long–remembered’) and knowingly fictionalised (‘long–invented’) past. It has a foot in fantasy, although the behaviour and attitudes it inspires are for the real world (‘Arthur practised the code wherever possible’).

If ‘chivalry’ was a set of expectations and practices, a value system or even a culture, it was also a body of writing. It engendered, and then drew upon, a literary corpus, of which its practitioners were both authors and audience, creators and consumers. Chivalric literature took many forms: violent epic, courtly romance, stylised biography, practical manuals, political chronicles. This chapter offers a roadmap of this material, beginning with texts about contemporary events: chronicles, vitae and political poetry. It then turns to romance and chanson de geste, the heartland of chivalric writing. Finally, it looks at the flip–side: pastiches that poked fun at or more seriously satirised the chivalric modus operandi.