![]() Chivalric HeroinesĬhrétien’s patroness was Marie of Champagne, a daughter of England’s Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine by her first husband, King Louis VII of France.Īs Chrétien avers, in the opening lines of this tale, The Knight of the Cart-the story of Lancelot and Guinevere:Ĭhrétien de Troyes attributed the inspiration for his tales to his patroness, Marie of Champagne. ![]() They were also being authored or instigated by women-notably the lais of Marie de France, which date from the 1160s and the chivalric romances of Chrétien de Troyes, who attributes the inspiration for his tales, and at least one plot, to his patroness. Chivalric entertainments revolved as much around love as war, and featured women as powerful protagonists. These interactions, crucial as they clearly are, still don’t explain why the culture of chivalry in Europe came to revolve around, and be significantly shaped by, the influence and patronage of women. ![]() It is also breaking down longstanding assumptions about the existence of an inevitable, hard-and-fast Christian-Muslim binary: assumptions that have more to do with medieval and modern polemics than with complex, day-to-day interactions of people in real time. While some of the older arguments were reductive and naïve, new efforts to recover these connections through the study of art, material culture, music, and languages (among other sources) is enriching what we know about the shared culture of medieval elites. (Image: JOSE LUIS BORBOLLA/Shutterstock) Influence and Patronage of Women Medieval chivalric entertainments revolved as much around love as war. The idea of courtly love, the songs of the troubadours, and the more polished manners of the warrior class, all were attributed to contact with the Islamicate world. By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Scholars in the mid-20th century hypothesized that many of the new art forms and attitudes that characterize the code of chivalry in medieval Europe must have been the result of the crusades, and might even have originated in Muslim lands.
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