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 fable.
The Texts
The didactic nature of medieval literature is always emphasized. The term “medieval literature” itself encompasses textual forms that are clearly beyond what modern traditions deem to be literature—especially after the eighteenth century.19 Medieval literary didacticism includes narrative texts, poetry, and dramas yet also large compilations of philosophical, theological, political, and juridical texts, among others. It is not unusual to find chapters devoted to the Siete Partidas, for example, in medieval literary anthologies.
Nonetheless, the concept of didacticism is ill suited to the vastness of what we usually refer to as “medieval literature.” Didacticism is based on the transmission of a series of relatively stable codes, where every textual resource available is engaged. This hinders our appreciation of the complexity of the textual and intellectual production of the Middle Ages.
The problem of didacticism has been addressed by Julian Weiss in The “Mester de Clerecía”: Intellectuals and Ideologies in Thirteenth-Century Castile, where he concludes that to speak of didactic medieval literature and textual production in general is to undermine the originality of medieval intellectual contributions. Although the weight of tradition is extraordinary, especially when it comes to the rhetorical artifacts at play, the culture of the late Middle Ages was innovative on politics, law, moral relations, and tropological models—even more than anagogic models. Hence I never use the concept of didacticism (assuming it is indeed a concept) or marshal the concept of ideology. I argue that the originality of medieval texts lies in their theoretical reach and in their relentless, permanently inchoate drive to elude ideology and focus on inquiry.
The notion that medieval texts are highly theoretical aids the study of texts on knighthood. They are even independent of other textual, literary, and rhetorical texts, as each chivalric text advances a theory on knighthood, on its role in the social, political, and moral universe—and on the path to salvation. Chivalry is theory, and that’s why the embedding of a pedagogical fable within the chivalry fable is of absolute essence.
Chivalric theory permeates all the texts on knighthood and produces interactions between them that have not been sufficiently studied. This book will delve into many of them. The most striking example is the historiographic narration of the knightly investiture of Alfonso XI of Castile, as it enacts the chivalric and monarchical theory introduced in a chanson de geste—the Mocedades de Rodrigo—later incorporated into the Crónica de Castilla. This process of interaction is crucial to the creation of chivalric theory and is a constant quest to shape diverse cultural discourses. Knighthood is prominently theoretical, so I will also address the interaction among theoretical texts. Although my main sources are the regulations of chivalric institutions, these cannot be read without taking into account the textual and imaginary models that interact with them on a theoretical level.
Dynamics and Forms
Knighthood traditionally resides in the diffuse space of adventure and displacements across the physical and mystical frontiers of the kingdom and between the concepts of monarchy and social order. Medieval courts were also adventurous; they were in constant movement and, instead of itinerant, in this book I cast them as nomadic institutions. Even court members were so variable that they were impossible to name. The cleric Walter Map, a government official under the English king Henry II Plantagenet, stated in his book about the court, De nugis curialium (probably written before 1189), that the members of the court were in permanent mutation and that “hodie sumus una multitudo, cras erimus alia” (“to-day we are one number, to-morrow we shall be a different one”).20 This constant shifting is an integral part of the permanent mythology of knighthood.
Whenever possible, this book will avoid such indeterminacy to analyze both chivalric citizenship and monarchical sovereignty. It will define, as precisely as possible, what constitutes these spaces, movements, and objects in which the poetics of the chivalric order is enacted. It will engage in a series of methodological considerations regarding the dynamics of power and how they are manifested. Dynamics of power are the processes by which potential and kinetic energies vie for the creation of spaces to negotiate the organization and control of jurisdictions. The metaphors of potential and kinetic energies point to the two central themes of this book: the planning of movement and the creation of networks (as elements of a potential dynamics) and their enactment in spaces in and out of city walls (as elements of a kinetic dynamics). It will examine three actors: the king who seeks the consolidation of central jurisdiction based on monarchical imperium (the ruling principle of modern absolutisms); the nobility, which strives to preserve its jurisdictional privileges vis-à-vis monarchical authority, based on feudal or lordship traditions; and the rising bourgeoisie, which tries to secure participation in the institutions erected by and within monarchical sovereignty.
A significant portion of this investigation is devoted to the examination of procedures for the assertion of power. There are two main expressions, or signifiers, of power: a documental aesthetics and the production of presence. Documental aesthetics refers to all the formal and formally regulated procedures, generally through legislation and legislative practice, articulated in the realm of the “dead voice” (that is, in authorized writing) to create what thirteenth-century procedural law designates as an “authentic person.”21 Production of presence—a termed coined by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht—implies methods of metonymic creation of resources whose physical appearance interferes with cognitive processes in such a way that the signifier itself becomes an epistemological barrier for the signified. Instead of an interpretation or a hermeneutical cycle, the production of presence evokes another presence—or another absence. From a rhetorical point of view, the enacted presence is a metonymy, instead of a metaphor or an allegory.22 In this study, the production of presence involves books, urban spaces, manifestations of the physical strength of certain forms of citizenship, or material and heraldic signs, among others. The production of these elements will be key to our understanding of the poetics of the order.
Each of the six chapters of this book is devoted to the poetics of the chivalric ordo in knighthood’s development and transformation throughout the kingdom of Castile and León. Most studies on chivalry have an ample scope and tend to discuss medieval chivalry in general. The Middle Ages, however, constitute an impregnable period. To address it as a whole while discussing chivalry is to omit a number of issues that require a genealogical perspective rather than a historical approach. In fact, this study conceives of itself as a chapter in a genealogy of chivalry. The chronological
