Thesiss

Prior to the onset of the crusades at the end of the eleventh century, the highest male calling was monastic—to give oneself over utterly to Christ. Though armies were an undeniable fact in medieval existence, it was not until the dawn of the crusades that the military vocation,…

This dissertation has sought to illuminate the characters of Richard the Lion Heart and Salah Ad-Din Al-Ayyubi (Saladin), and the meaning of chivalry as a concept in Western history, through a comparative "parallel biography" of the two men. It is hoped that this parallel biogra…

Richard I took the cross in 1187 and went on crusade in 1190. This dissertation examines Richard's decision in two contexts. First, Richard was the product of a twelfth-century culture that promoted and idealized crusade. Richard internalized conceptions of crusade from the fami…

This dissertation argues that the traditional connection between chivalry, noble identity and noble violence persisted in France until the middle of the seventeenth century. It therefore contributes both to the scholarly literature on noble culture in early modern France and to …

This study examines crusader kingship as a unique paradigm of monarchy in the twelfth century. Using crusade chronicles, chansons de geste, trouveres poetry, coronation liturgies, letters, treatises and artwork, three themes of royal power are identified and analyzed: chivalric …

The Franks in the Levant during the era of the Crusades brought with them a culture built around the owning of land and terra firma military exploits. Naval power was not something they fully understood, or even recognized as a need. To them, ships were tools for assisting with …

The Unicorn Tapestries are a set of seven tapestries, located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters in New York, of Parisian design and woven in the Southern Netherlands in the late Middle Ages. It has baffled scholars for decades. These tapestries are shrouded in myster…

For centuries, people have been captivated by tales of questing knights, fair ladies, and magical encounters. As someone who grew up immersed in the fantasy genre, transitioning from the Brian Jacques Redwall series as a child to George R.R. Martin's A Song of lce and Fire as an…

This dissertation argues that the chivalric code and resulting “ethos” of chivalry creates a physical, religious, and social burden upon the medieval knights tasked with its application and adherence. The immediate result of this chivalric burden is the inability of knights to l…