6 - Men and Masculinities at the Courts of the Anglo-Norman Kings in the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis

Summary

‘I got in with the ugly crowd, a crowd of serious deadbeats, lowlifes, unrepentant no-good punks…’

Barack Obama, on campaign in 2008

The words of the forty-fourth president of the United States, referring to the members of the US Senate, would have been instantly recognized and admired by twelfth-century writers of political narrative, as an instance of facetia, the demonstration of an urbane wit intended to oil the cogs of a tightly wound, fast-moving, court society. Over the last three decades, there has been an increasing accumulation of scholarly discussion on the nature, function, and historical significance of this social world and the place of gender within it. Much of it has been written, explicitly or implicitly, in response to Norbert Elias' classic, The Civilizing Process, which was published in 1939 but much more widely consulted after its English translation decades later. There Elias argued that it was the courts of early modern European monarchs that first came to act as powerful mechanisms for regularized competition and political cohesion by taming the fiercely independent and volatile instincts and activities of warrior elites.

A grand claim with a specific chronology, like the rise of the ‘middling sort’, or the discovery of the individual, or the emergence of emotional commitment within the family, Elias' thesis threw down a gauntlet of modernization theory irresistible to medievalists. C. Stephen Jaeger was one of the first to claim courtliness for the medieval period, by tracing its origins back to tenth-century Germany and the Ottonian ‘courtier bishop’.