Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry & Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance

Abstract

Knights at Court is a grand tour and survey of manners, manhood, and court life in Middle Ages, like no other in print. Composed on an epic canvas, this authoritative work traces development of court culture and its various manifestations from latter years of Holy Roman Empire (ca. A.D. 1000) to Italian Renaissance of fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Leading medievalist and Renaissance scholar Aldo Scaglione offers a sweeping sociological view of three geographic areas that reveals a surprising continuity of courtly forms and motifs: German romances; lyrical and narrative literature of northern and southern France; Italy's chivalric poetry.Scaglione discusses a broad number of texts, from early Norman and Flemish baronial chronicles to romances of Chretien de Troyes, troubadours and Minnesingers. He delves into Niebelungenlied, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and an array of treatises on conduct down to Castiglione and his successors. All these works and Scaglione's superior scholarship attest to enduring power over minds and hearts of a mentality that issued from a small minority of people - courtiers and knights - in central positions of leadership and power. Knights at Court is for all scholars and students interested in the civilizing process.

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