Abstract, Kalamazoo 2011: "Knighthood Continued"

The paper for which the following abstract was written was presented at the 2011 International Congress on Medieval Studies.

Scholars such as Badenhausen, Herman, and Smuts contend that the early Stuart dynasty in England largely rejected the chivalric forms and ideas that had pervaded Elizabethan England. The notion has something of common sense about it, given the emergent Commonwealth government and its concomitant rejection of older ideals of monarchal power. There is also some indication from the 1634 Stansby edition of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur that the chivalric code had fallen into disrepute. Some historical and textual evidence, however, strongly suggests that knightly conduct was not as soundly rejected by Stuart England as is often supposed; much in Stansby’s text and its historical context addresses an ongoing chivalric rhetoric that extends at least to the execution of Charles I.