Taking the field : knighthood and society in the high Middle Ages

In popular imagination few phenomena are as strongly associated with medieval society as knighthood and chivalry. At the same time, and due to a long tradition of differing national perspectives and ideological assumptions, few phenomena have continued to be the object of so much academic debate. The volume Knighthood and Society in the High Middle Ages explores various aspects of chivalric identity formation, taking into account both commonalities and peculiarities across Western Europe. This introductory chapter first provides a historiographical frame in which any consideration of chivalric identity has to be set. It then attempts to clarify the most important assumptions and points of view about the interwovenness of nobility and knighthood. Finally, it briefly introduces what the various essays collected in this volume have to offer individually, and what they might tell us collectively about how, between the eleventh and the early thirteenth centuries, knighthood evolved from a set of skills and a lifestyle that was typical of an emerging elite habitus, into the basis of a consciously expressed and idealised chivalric code of conduct