1986 Chapters (Layout Features)

Chapter 5: Adapting Conventions of Courtliness

Crane, Susan

Two young men seeking brides illustrate what happens to ideas of love and chivalry between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. These two courtships trace a change in the relation of literary
ideals and historical practice, from superficial imitation to serious and life-risking engagement. Critics have attributed the change itself to royal programs of control and to increasing economic constraints on the barony, as well as to the stimulus of chivalric literature. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the landholding class lost economic ground to the expanding mercantile sector and later to labor, and yielded political terrain to the crown.