There are two kinds of knights: Real ones and fictional ones.

This is a book about the fictional ones -- in particular, those found in the literary medieval romances. Author Charles Moorman sets out to trace the history of these not-very-real knights. He begins with the knights of the epic (e.g. the Song of Roland), then moves on through Chrètien de Troyes, the Gawain-Poet, Chaucer, and even late authors like Shakespeare and Spenser. The conception certainly does change: Roland is mostly a fighting machine, Gawain mostly a courtier. Spenser still has some respect for the courtier model; Shakespeare reflects the obvious fact that knights came in all shapes, sizes, and degrees of morality.

This general trend can hardly be denied. The details, though, strike me as dubious. Moorman, for instance, argues that Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- contrary to the general view that he was a very noble man with a minor flaw -- was instead a flawed man from an even more flawed court, who barely survived his ordeal, went back to Camelot bearing one last chance for Arthur's court, and, when they ignored him, decided to go back to his bad old ways.

I'm not as familiar with Chrètien's romances as with Sir Gawain, but the plot structure Moorman described didn't seem quite right to me. And when he got to Chaucer, he seemed to really be mucking around in the underbrush of philosophy rather than looking at the pure, crystalline morality of stories like The Knight's Tale. I didn't realize it as I was reading the book, but in trying to review it, it seems to me that Moorman has quite consistently deflated the Romance knight. In one sense, this is fair -- very few actual people resembled Sir Gawain, or Chaucer's Knight (let alone Roland). But Chaucer's Knight, in particular, seems to be intended to be just about the ideal example of chivalry, gentilesse, and trouthe. Moorman might have done better to let him be that. ( )