Knighthood and the Body in Late Medieval English Culture

This thesis examines the corporeal identity of the knight as depicted in late medieval English culture. Critical readings of Middle English romance, chronicles, medical texts, and natural philosophy identify a set of morphological and physiological motifs by which the knight was characterised in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. The thesis argues that the late medieval knight can be examined through the lens of embodiment theory, as expounded on in the works of sociologist Bryan Turner (1984), philosopher Gail Weiss (1999), and psychologist Elena Faccio (2014). Embodiment describes the phenomenon of ‘being’ rather than ‘having’ a body, drawing attention to the ways in which particular socio-cultural identities become essentialised within select physical types. Like bodies themselves, however, embodied identities are not fixed but are instead always in the making. The thesis evaluates the constituent parts of the knight’s embodiment, arguing that embodied knighthood is a chimeric construct, reliant on diffuse medieval ideas regarding the body, lifecycle, physical trauma, fashion, and human encounters with nonhuman things. The thesis uses four chapters, each discussing one of the ‘bodies’ which contributed to embodied knighthood.