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Michael Prestwich, Richard W. Kaeuper. Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry. (The Middle Ages Series.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. Pp. viii, 331. $59.95, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Page 877, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.877
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It is not easy to square the often harsh reality of medieval knighthood with the theories of chivalric conduct. The brutality of battle and the hard bargaining over ransom payments seem at odds with the pious ideals of works such as Geoffroi de Charny's Book of Chivalry (ca. 1350). One solution is to argue that the chivalric code applied only to knightly equals, and not to the way in which common people might be treated: the knightly order created by the French chivalric hero Boucicaut was, for example, intended to provide protection solely for upper-class ladies. There still remained, however, a moral dilemma at the heart of chivalry: how to justify violence while maintaining high Christian principles.
In this book, Richard W. Kaeuper provides a perceptive and skilled analysis of the religious concepts that underpinned chivalry. Geoffroi de Charny's treatise, and Henry of Lancaster's explicitly religious Livre des Seyntz Medicines (1354), provide a starting point in analyzing the strand of thought that saw knighthood as a religious calling. There was obviously no difficulty in seeing crusading in this light, but Kaeuper convincingly shows that for many there was no clear distinction between crusades and other forms of justified warfare. It was common to condemn enemies as being even worse than Saracens, and crusading was not the only route to salvation for a knight. Heroic deeds of arms could be a form of penance. The career of a true knight involved much suffering and pain, leading eventually to a chivalric heaven.
