'Swete harm': Chivalry and the consent to violence in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Jean Froissart.

摘要

Critical readings of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Jean Froissart have been hampered by a modern notion that the relationship between violence and social structure must always be obfuscated. Both Chaucer and Froissart recognized chivalry in the fourteenth century as a pragmatic institution that created a societal discourse around the violence that knights perpetrated and suffered. Such a view of chivalry was explicitly present in the contemporary manuals and commentaries of chivalry in the period, which included the anonymous L'Ordene de Chevalerie, the Libre del Orde de Cauayleria of Ramon Llull, and Livre de Chevalerie of Geoffroi de Charny. In these works, chivalry was not an abstract and unrealistic code, but a system of discourse: a way for knights to talk to each other about the ambiguous moral choices that confront them in military practice. While there is no evidence that either Chaucer or Froissart read these chivalric texts, it is possible to apply the historicist and literary reception models of Hans Robert Jauss, Jerome McGann, and Stephen Greenblatt to argue that the relationship between violence and social structure expressed in the manuals and commentaries was a pervasive cultural idea that also found expression, more subtly, in the work of Chaucer and Froissart. Froissart, in his self-appointed role as chronicler of chivalry, had the opportunity to report the speech of knights concerning their moral choices throughout his Chronicles. Meanwhile, Chaucer was afforded numerous opportunities to express different aspects of chivalric culture in both his narrative of the Trojan War--- Troilus and Criseyde---and his estates satire, The Canterbury Tales.