In 1996 Maurice Keen published a collection of his essays that stretched back over thirty years, the first appearing in 1962. In his foreword he wrote the following:

With characteristic humility he neatly sidestepped his own role in making ‘the subject of chivalry what I had not expected it to prove, a lively and vigorous branch of late medieval studies’, by highlighting the major work undertaken by some of his contemporaries. It is universally acknowledged, however, that Maurice's work, pre-eminently his Chivalry, first published in 1984, for which he won the Wolfson Literary Prize for History, was seminal in bringing about this shift in interest. Chivalry was swiftly acknowledged as a masterpiece of historical writing, one of the great books of medieval history produced in the Anglophone world during the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was, and remains, a trailblazer and pathfinder for further research. There are perhaps four interconnected reasons why this should be so.

The first is the approach. Maurice defined chivalry at the outset as ‘an ethos in which martial, aristocratic and Christian elements were fused together’. It was, arguably, his exploration of the nature and manner of this fusion that was the prime factor in producing such a deeply satisfying account of this peculiarly western blend of the warrior ethos. Whilst by no means denying the significance of clerical learning nor indeed the role of the crusade in the western warriors’ make-up, Maurice nevertheless removed the priestly veil from the eyes of the observer, revealing chivalry to be in essence ‘a mode of living’ within which secular values supplied the hard core. Knightly piety was certainly more than a veneer and a whole panoply of pre-existing ideas were drawn into the mould, yet chivalry was fundamentally ‘the secular code of honour of a martially-orientated society’.