LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      Poetics of the Ordo

      This investigation arises from the question of how a social class is created. Such an inquiry belongs in an exceedingly complex territory where it is necessary to parse the diversity of voices that participate in this creation as well as the interests that motivate each of these voices. It is difficult to determine whether a social class is the object of a creation, or the subject of that creation. One of the aims of this study is to probe this difference by examining the various forces and voices that created the chivalric class.

      Chivalry is an integral principle of Western politics, society, and morality. It encompasses the framework of moral and political categories that underpin interpersonal networks as well as relationships between genders or between institutions throughout Western culture—categories that have ramifications in everyday Western vocabulary, such as loyalty, gallantry, adventure, friendship, civil life, and honor. Some of its ramifications are also among the most questionable of Western political, military, and moral categories: crusade, reconquest, gender inequality, and social asymmetry. Nevertheless, knighthood subsumes all these concepts, as if this class in a permanent state of creation—a perennially inchoate poetics—were the ideal laboratory for the incorporation of all these ideas into discourse. The most cogent argument for the social and political worth of the chivalric class is the fascinating strategy that it represents: the creation of knighthood is a process that transforms disorderly violence into institutionally regulated violence, and sets a structure that buttresses the civic values of a peaceful society. This study also seeks to ascertain how this political transformation of civilian life took place during the advent of modernity.

      This research is a radical departure from my previous work on chivalry. In it, I endeavor to overstep the traditional debate on chivalry presented in my 1996 book, El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV (The Debate Regarding Chivalry in the Fifteenth Century). I will venture into a scarcely studied field that is fundamental to understand the construction of modern structures of power. The present study will focus on how certain bourgeois groups that accrued a growing economic importance set up new spheres of power by invoking and reinventing discourses on chivalry. It will also examine the genealogy of the bourgeois voice and its process of institutionalization as it came to dominate urban centers and became one of the central powers of the imperium. This genealogy will reveal how rising bourgeois groups deployed their strategies by producing manuscripts, both public and private, and building an archive that they sought to control. These documents reveal how these bourgeois groups express their newly acquired voice, how they display their bodies and occupy the urban space, and how they manifest this, as a new expression of power, before the king, thereby creating a modification in the realm of monarchical sovereignty.

      The main objects of inquiry

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