10 - Origins of Courtliness after 25 Years

Summary

This article offers a review of the reception of my book The Origins of Courtliness and a survey of research in the area of courtly culture since its appearance in 1985. It developed from a session at Kalamazoo 2009, which was originally proposed very generously by Stephen Carey and Scott Pincikowski to ‘celebrate my contributions’ to scholarship in medieval studies. I suggested instead a session devoted to a critical discussion of Origins, which has in the meantime turned twenty-five. The purpose of the session was not to be celebratory but to test critically the ideas that book proposed, now so long ago. I realize now that my suggestion may well have shown more superbia than the original idea of a kind of retirement party with congratulatory well-wishing contributions. A book of scholarship at age twenty-five is in the position of a man at age ninety, ready to be laid to rest: its contribution is made; its ideas adopted, refuted, or ignored (or all three); its physical presence interred on library shelves in sure and certain expectation of the move to the library storage facility. My suggestion to Stephen and Scott presumed life, if not resurrection, which is only granted to books by their readers or by publishers. The Erich Schmidt Verlag in Berlin published a German translation in 2001. Its sales figures might be read as signs of life; its reception in print by German colleagues was mixed.

I will try to address, in order of the book's chronology (939–1210), first, the major points raised by Origins that have filtered into the history of medieval courtesy; second, those which have been challenged; and third, points which have roused no real response, though, to my mind, they deserve further study.

The Origins of Courtliness was intended to be and remains a study of court ideals approached via the Latin writings largely of secular clerics from the age prior to and during the period of the formation of courtly literature. Though the approach was not new, it had only partially been explored.