Крепости и рицарство
CASTLES AND KNIGHTS

Summary/Abstract: The text represents a fi rst attempt at comparing a concrete social phenomenon, the Knighthood, with the highest cultural manifestation of his own self-sensation – the written records of the courtesy. Without having any claims on exhaustiveness, the text aims to grasp the characteristic for the medieval knight as a force, which forms the appearance of certain social relations, and also as an object of a literary idealization. Therefore we discuss at the same time the meanings, which are assigned to the images of the knight, the fortress and the tournament, and which are contained in several selected, representative sources and records. Through these two – the fortress and the tournament – the knight can be adequately defi ned as a social figure. By virtue of that, we could distinguish the single motives within the courtesy literature: imaginative, sensual, religiously disciplining, social ennobling, authentically martial etc. Furthermore we obtain some notion of a concrete condition, with which comes into collision as a problem the culturally dominating idea with an ecclesiological origin of the three ordines in the medieval societas.

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