How is chivalry used to achieve these ends? The answer is what this book refers to as the “chivalric fable.” The chivalric fable is the process through which chivalry becomes a political, juridical, and intellectual tool. The hermeneutic principle of this process is partially rooted in Richard Rorty’s concept of social hope.8 The chivalric fable conveys the hope that through a series of diversely codified political and moral acts, the subject can achieve social recognition and assume jurisdictional authority.
The fable, an Aristotelian concept after all, is a rhetorical device and a literary structure. Literary structure is the most prevalent form in the theoretical construction of knighthood. A theoretical articulation through literature may posit courtly life as the construction of a space of cultural cooperation where nobles and clerics come together—and where performances are staged based on all manner of narratives, particularly those with a literary or musical element. The theoretical efficiency of the literary narrative is essential to rhetoric and poetic theory, from its inception, by way of affectum—emotions, or the several forms of catharsis. Rorty has reiterated this aspect; according to him, literary construction aids the articulation of dialectical experiences—comparative descriptions of the world and “language games”—in a way that the abstract forms of theory or philosophy cannot, since it is based on the relationship between theory and human emotions.9 In the case of knighthood, these emotions, catharses, or affects are related to some of the fundamental themes of the chivalric framework: anagogic and tropologic salvation through actions, love, and friendship.
The chivalric fable was originally staged by clerical voices in the space of the court. The fable is woven around a fairly simple, but highly effective narrative structure. The plot (or rhetorical argumentum) usually involves a character who lacks name or fame and can only bear a blank coat of arms—with no heraldic signs. Either this character occupies a dubious or unknown position in his lineage, or his lineage has declined.10 In the fable he may earn a name, distinction, heraldic signs, fame, and status within the structure of power through an individual display of virtue dictated by a theoretically articulated chivalric model. This denouement of the fable renders social hope explicit.
These texts articulate a chivalric model that frequently assumes the structure of a pedagogical fable to secure theoretical depth, as the narrative pauses to allow a qualified individual to posit this theory to the protagonist. A salient example is Lancelot, perhaps the most universal of medieval knights, whose chivalric model is based on the education that he receives from the Lady of the Lake, just as his kindred are exiled.11 In another example, the Valencian novel Tirant lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell (published in 1490), Tirant, traveling to the courts that will knight him, is delayed so that a hermit who had once been a noble knight can instruct him. In their meeting and subsequent interaction, Tirant and the hermit are both separated from society: the former because he is yet to become someone (although he will later become the megaduke of the Byzantine Empire, and nearly the emperor), and the latter because he has decided not to be someone, after abandoning chivalric life.12 This pedagogic fable is similar to the one depicted in its sources, Ramon Llull’s treatise Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria (1279–1283) and the thirteenth-century romance Guillem de Vàroic.13 There are multiple chivalric models engendered by this pedagogic fable. Among the many examples I could mention are Merlin’s education of King Arthur; Don Juan Manuel’s hermit knight; Zifar and his two sons, Garfín and Roboán, in the Libro del cavallero Zifar (ca. 1330); or, in the same work, the relatively unique case of Zifar’s enlightenment after meeting Ribaldo, a popular, non-noble and nonchivalric character who becomes the “caballero Amigo” (Sir Friend) and “conde Amigo” (Count Friend).14
The fable launches several crucial transformations. The most relevant of these changes occurs when the meaning of chivalric virtue is fixed or when the model that the knight must follow is constructed. The order of discourse can change in the secondary pedagogical fable, incorporated into the larger fable, once a concrete social hope is advanced. Hence, it is in the process of defining a social hope that the discourse of chivalry is reformulated.15
The chivalric fable, however, comprises a much more complex problem. It answers the question of how knighthood may be used productively. This question addresses the theoretical problem of how a chivalric fable comes to life in all its political, social, and pedagogical angles; as well as the pragmatic one of how it may transform a concrete order.
It is in the establishment of this direct relationship between the theory and the praxis of knighthood where the sway of chivalric order as a social hope is settled. What, exactly, constitutes this social hope? How does it manifest itself? The discourse on knighthood rendered at the heart of the fable is reformulated upon the sphere of social hope. This social hope is a discursive act, a performance in which individuals or groups (chivalric orders or urban knighthood congregations, for instance) synthesize their depiction of the sociopolitical benefits of chivalry.16 Social hope is thus manifold. It entails the consolidation of a collective well-being and of possible aspirations reserved by, and for, particular segments of society.
Chivalry as we know it takes shape around the eleventh century and the pedagogical and ritualistic model that frames it is oriented toward the creation of controls for social violence. Clerical voices that appropriate and dominate the discourse on chivalry center it in the social ambit of nobility. This is a nobility regulated by Christian law and designed to benefit other social groups. The aspiration, or hope, that is created for them is that of salvation. This anagogic hope, however, has a significant tropological element: from this moment forward, knighthood will evolve not as the fearsome social class that it was but as the defender of the weak, the most generous and courteous class. This model gave rise to others, including the idea of courtly generosity (largitas or largesce in the medieval vocabulary), dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as well the representation of the court as schola, an educational institution with a political angle.17
Chivalry is a political and social apparatus (dispositif) where every locus of action or cultural practice is theoretically defined. This notion may be elucidated by Clifford Geertz’s adaptation of Weber’s concept of culture, which proposes that since man “is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of laws but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”18 These webs of significance—the whole semiotic, spatial universe, the articulation of a voice, modes of representation, and systems of relationships—are cultural operations that make it possible to construct both social and private hope. It is therefore fitting to delve into the cultural conditions that led to the construction of social hope through chivalry.
The analysis of this chivalric social hope reveals that not only are these hopes plural, but they also form complex constellations. Because of the social hope that sustains it, an ordo is an apparatus that can be useful to many structures and discourses of power. Different classes or centers of power can invoke the social hope of chivalry to demand different and even mutually exclusive privileges. King Alfonso XI’s reasons for creating a discourse on chivalry are quite distinct from those of Don Juan Manuel, yet both dispute the hope that chivalry could entail for the social and political life of Castilian ricos hombres (high nobility), caballeros hidalgos (noble knights), or caballeros villanos (bourgeois knights, non-nobles who lived mainly in the cities). A distinction is often made between the discourse of chivalry and the discourse of nobility—or between clerical discourse and that of lay nobility—but this distinction is a delusion of historiography derived from the tendency of nineteenth-century scientific logic to polarize branches of traditions. What the genealogy of knighthood shows us is not that there are two branches of chivalric social hope, but that chivalry constantly develops and incorporates innovative discourses and orders.
The poetics of the ordo is an attempt to understand the specific creative and institutional processes that reconfigured chivalry in the liminal space between theory and practice. This process deploys a strong juridical language that constitutes a particular and dialectic expression of a public hope by inserting the institution in a dialogue between pedagogy and narrative that is at the core of the chivalric