Watch out for that word!

I have been looking over the short papers handed in last Tuesday about what knights did.  One quite reasonable  piece caught my attention by its assumption in several places that we all know what chivalry means. One point that was made more than once is that the actual knights depicted in our readings did not measure up to some standard of chivalry that was not specified.

Watch out for this trap! We have already seen, and will see repeatedly in times to come, that "chivalry" is a tricky word that means different things to different people, even back in the Middle Ages. If you are going to praise or criticize some person or group on the basis of their "chivalry," you better be clear what you mean by that word and where you are deriving that meaning from.

If you are interested in different concepts of chivalry, I suggest that you go to Scott Ferrell's Chivalry Ttoday website and listen to some of the podcasts there. They are free, interesting, and sometimes even brilliant. Now that you  have had a good look at Charny, you might want to listen to Richard Kaeuper or even me.