Order and Chivalry. Jesus D. Rodriguez-Velasco

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      Introduction

      Poetics of the Ordo

      This investigation arises from the question of how a social class is created. Such an inquiry belongs in an exceedingly complex territory where it is necessary to parse the diversity of voices that participate in this creation as well as the interests that motivate each of these voices. It is difficult to determine whether a social class is the object of a creation, or the subject of that creation. One of the aims of this study is to probe this difference by examining the various forces and voices that created the chivalric class.

      Chivalry is an integral principle of Western politics, society, and morality. It encompasses the framework of moral and political categories that underpin interpersonal networks as well as relationships between genders or between institutions throughout Western culture—categories that have ramifications in everyday Western vocabulary, such as loyalty, gallantry, adventure, friendship, civil life, and honor. Some of its ramifications are also among the most questionable of Western political, military, and moral categories: crusade, reconquest, gender inequality, and social asymmetry. Nevertheless, knighthood subsumes all these concepts, as if this class in a permanent state of creation—a perennially inchoate poetics—were the ideal laboratory for the incorporation of all these ideas into discourse. The most cogent argument for the social and political worth of the chivalric class is the fascinating strategy that it represents: the creation of knighthood is a process that transforms disorderly violence into institutionally regulated violence, and sets a structure that buttresses the civic values of a peaceful society. This study also seeks to ascertain how this political transformation of civilian life took place during the advent of modernity.

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