Knightly Fables, Visual Concepts: On the Affinity Between Chivalry and Bourgeoisie

Lancelot in the Lancelot en prose; Erec in Chrétien de Troyes' Erec; Renaut de Beaujeau's Li Biaus Desconneüs; Tirant lo Blanc in Joanot Martorell's masterwork; Amadís de Gaula in Rodrigo Díaz de Montalvo's successful recast; Galahad in La queste del saint Graal; Zifar in his Libro, among others.2 The previous paragraph may suggest that the knightly fable is a narrative structure, a combination of narrative motifs like the ones collected by Anti Aarne and Stith Thompson.3 I would rather argue that the structure is only a vehicle for the central thesis of the knightly fable, what I have called the social and political hope-that is, the idea that from loss, exile, and certain kinds of education, knighthood can endow an individual with territory, material wealth, and power. For those groups, mostly of bourgeois origin and clearly related to dominant economic forces within cities, knighthood was a mine to exploit in order to shape political and social hopes and, by means of them, transform political and legal entities into the structures of power that we call urban centers-centers that facilitated the growth of bourgeois power, the construction of new walled micro-states, and that set up the early models of gentrification.