One thing I found interesting in “The Book of the Order of Chivalry” is that Lull says a knight must be feared. The Green Knight praises Gawain but Gawain only criticizes himself. They hold themselves to impossible standards.
They are described as the best of the best. “And from each thousand was chosen one man who more than all the others was most loyal, most noble in courage, best instructed, and best mannered.” made me think of the superlatives we’ve read before about knights like Lancelot and Sir Gawain. In Lull’s “The Book of the Order of Chivalry”’s intro, only the best of the best are chosen from a group of thousands. (As a side note, I thought it was interesting how little Lull discussed honoring one’s king, because this is portrayed as possibly the most important trait of a knight in many of the narratives we’ve read.) The necessity that knights “uphold and defend women” is also central to texts we have read, and failure to is depicted as “folly” (341). Knights making possibly foolish decisions (Lancelot hesitating to, and then alighting the cart, for instance) have often been driving plot elements. In terms of knightly virtues, I think Lull’s emphasis on a knight being reasonable rather than foolish comes through in many of the narratives we’ve read this semester. Of course, Lull’s language also implies the gravity with which he is approaching knighthood and what constitutes a worthy knight he refers to chivalry as a science (339) and also describes how crucial the study of Christian doctrine is to a knight’s training. These characteristics are all featured in the romances we’ve read, though perhaps we take them for granted as readers as part of the world/setting. Lull describes how the true knight needs to be served by “the most noble beast,” that being the horse (337), have “a servant who can care for his horse” (338), and routinely participate in hunts and jousting tournaments. I was struck by how much attention Lull, in The Book of the Order of Chivalry, devoted to the technical/material aspects of being a knight, which we didn’t see as much in, for instance, Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love.
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