'Beyond Shame: Chivalric Cowardice and Arthurian Narrative'

Cahiers de Recherches Medievales et Humanistes, 2012

Chivalric literature offered a powerful celebration of courage and denunciation of the shame of cowardice. This article explores the relationship between late medieval French debates on this subject and the military reality of the period. Résumé : La littérature chevaleresque offre une célébration forte du courage et une dénonciation de la honte que représente la lâcheté. Cet article explore le lien entre les débats français sur ce sujet à la fin du Moyen Âge et la réalité militaire de l'époque.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2013

This paper examines the concept of courage within medieval ethics and uses the Battle of Agincourt as a case-study for how medieval writers discussed this virtue. It shows how courage was defined as the virtuous mean between the vices of cowardice on the one hand and of foolhardiness on the other. Giles of Rome's Aristotelian discussion of courage sets out seven kinds of fortitude and argues that true courage is when men choose of their own free will to fight for the common good.

War in History, 2013

Previous surveys of medieval thinking with regard to courage and cowardice have concluded that the greatest opprobrium was reserved for those knights who turned and fled from battle. A close examination of the many sources for the First Crusade, however, indicates that such battlefield behaviour was far less of an issue than that of desertion from the campaign. There is no comparison between the anger and violent expression of dismay directed towards those who abandoned the crusade and that levelled at those who fled from fighting. What this suggests is that the all-or-nothing nature of the enterprise, once it was far from Christian territories, combined with a theology that equated leaving the army with the violation of a pilgrim’s oath, altered the participant’s concept of cowardice. Leaving the crusade was the highest form of cowardice and all other displays of fear were relatively excusable.

2013

2020

MA Dissertation (2020) Chivalry in the Middle Ages has often been defined as ‘the religious and moral system of behavior that the perfect knight was expected to follow’.1 However, singular definitions of chivalry should be disregarded because displays of medieval masculinity and chivalry were a complicated mixture of social conditions, institutional influence, and individual motivation. Using fictional and 'factual' literature, the dissertation attempts to understand the multiplicity of masculinity and individual knightly motivations caused by competing factual and fictional depictions of chivalry. Overall, histories of chivalry and masculinity between c.1350-c.1410 in France have been treated singularly for one core reason: the ideal qualities of chivalry have been treated as the reality for all-knights, when in fact chivalric ideologies were unique to individuals and overlapped in both factual and fictional literature of the period.

War in History, 2013

2020

Journal of Military Ethics, 2014

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to demystify the ancient concept of courage making it more palpable for the modern reader, and to suggest the reasonably specific constraints which would restrict the contemporary tendency of indiscriminate attribution of this virtue. The discussion of courage will incorporate both the classical interpretations of this trait of character, and the empirical studies into the complex relation between the emotion of fear and behavior. The Aristotelian thesis that courage consists in overcoming the fear of significant harm for a worthy cause will be further developed by exploring its relevance for the military professionals today. The specific criteria will be offered in order to restrict the application of the term ‘courageous’ to a certain type of action, as well as to demarcate this virtue from the related vices, such as recklessness. The normative aspect of our study aims at making sense of what could qualify as a worthy goal of a fearless action in the modern world. It will be argued that a courageous agent aims at alleviating or preventing harm for others in a situation of potential risk for the agent himself, while respecting the factual conditions which determine the probability of success.

A spate of recent studies has again taken up the question of Roman society's conception of courage as "manliness" (virtus). 1 Juhani Karla Pollmann (2008), for example, have upheld the view that already at an early stage of the Latin language virtus was a wide-ranging moral value concept capable of signifying the range of corporeal and mental "excellences" from valor on the battlefield to virtue as ethical perfection. Myles has argued instead that the meaning of this word shifted over time in accordance with its usage as a key term of élite social competition: In archaic Latin, virtus was understood chiefly as martial prowess, and members of the early Republican aristocracy vied to advertise their virtus through public display.