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Chivalry, Renaissance Concept of

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Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy

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Abstract

Broadly speaking, chivalry or chivalric culture was a set of values cultivated by Europe’s military elite from the twelfth to the seventeenth century. These values differed in time and in place and interacted with other cultural values, such as those of the European Renaissance movement. Chivalric values often greatly contrasted with reality and were not embraced or acted upon by all warriors, knights, or nobility. While there was no “chivalric code” that all knights ascribed to, it is possible to identify several core chivalric ideals which appear in numerous types of sources over time. These were loyalty to one’s lord, skillful fighting on horseback (prowess), and generosity to one’s men (largesse). These ideals appear somewhat consistently starting in the twelfth century in both proscriptive literature for real knights and imaginative literature and chivalric romance. European chivalric culture was transformed by tensions between courtliness and prowess and between history and legend, as well as by the rise of the early modern state and the construction of its new armies and bureaucracies. Periodization for the end of chivalry helps to shape scholarly understanding of the nature of the European Renaissance and of the early modern period itself.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

    Elizabeth Ashcroft Terry-Roisin

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  1. Elizabeth Ashcroft Terry-Roisin
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Correspondence to Elizabeth Ashcroft Terry-Roisin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Philosophy a. Cultural Heritage, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia Dept. of Philosophy a. Cultural Heritage, Venezia, Italy

    Marco Sgarbi

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  1. Firenze, Italy

    Michael Wyatt

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Terry-Roisin, E.A. (2019). Chivalry, Renaissance Concept of. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_846-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_846-1

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