Ladies of the Knight Present...
We actually know very little about the Shield of parade. It is suspected to have been created circa 1470 in either Flanders, Belgium or France. We can see it depicts a courtly scene with a knight in contemporary Italian armour kneeling before a lady in Flemish dress. His pole-axe, gauntlets and helmet placed in front of him the helmet is an armet fashioned with a wrapper and aventail. The figure of death is behind him and the scroll above has the legend: ‘Vous Ou La Mort’ - You or Death.
Restoration in 1938 which removed clumsy overpainting, revealed several small details that help build an idea of what the shield represented. Chief among these discoveries was the legend itself and the scroll it decorates. Other smaller discoveries were detailing on the knight’s armour and the presence of his helmet and grieves, as well as the original shape and length of the Lady’s clothing and the unveiling of her belt’s jewel.
Development of Knighthood
What Historians Think
Of greater interest to historians is what the shield was intended for and what it is supposed to represent. A common interpretation is that the knight is so love sick he might die, but given the chivalrous expectations of the time historians such as James Robinson instead suggest that the knight is professing he would rather die than prove unworthy of the lady’s affection. However given that the delicately painted shield was clearly not intended for use in combat, historians have hypothesized that it could have been a prize at a tournament. This assumption leads to more diverse interpretations that the knight wants the women as a symbolic shield to protect him in the tournament, as suggested by Michael Camille, this has greater reliability given the bloody nature of tournaments. Alternatively John Cherry proposes the knight is using the threat of his death to sway the lady with pity.
Regardless the lady has uniformly been interpreted to be in the position of power, common across art depicting courtly themes during the medieval period, with Camille going as far as to advocate that she could be removing her belt to bind the knight rather than give him her favour.
Of particular interest is the macabre presence of death on the shield which on a base level is seen to represent the ubiquitous presence of death, even in romantic scenes, throughout this era. Where historians differ on the presence of death is whether it is supporting the knight, capturing him as the destroyer of the young and beautiful, or finally if he is pushing him forward acting as a twisted patron saint.
The lack of evidence makes the shield hard to discern but is certainly raises interesting ideas of the connections between love, death, piety and chivalry in the late medieval era.
Bibliography
T.D. Kendrick, 'A Flemish painted shield', The British Museum Quarterly-9, 13: 2 (1939), pp. 33-3
Cherry, Medieval decorative art (London, The British Museum Press, 1991)
Robinson, Masterpieces: Medieval Art (London, British Museum Press, 2008)
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hi/te_index.asp?i=15
De re militari: (http://deremilitari.org/)
http://deremilitari.org/2014/03/two-poems-by-the-twelfth-century-knight-troubadour-bertran-de-born/
http://deremilitari.org/2014/01/history-of-william-the-marshal-the-tournament-at-lagny-sur-marne/
Geoffrey de Charney, Book of Chivalry, trans. R. W. Kaeuper and E. Kennedy (2005)
Holden A. J., ed., History of William Marshall, Volume I-III, Text and translation, London, Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2002-2006
Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. J. Jay Parry (New York, 1960)
The Lais of Marie de France (Penguin Classics 1986)
Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances (Penguins Classics, 1991)
Shinners, J., ed., Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-1500: a Reader (1997): sources on death Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale, The Pardoner’s Tale.
The three living and the three dead: www.imagesonline.bl.uk
The dance of death: http://www.dodedans.com/Eindex.htm; The Triumph of Death (Pisa, 1330s)
Borst, A., ‘Knighthood in the High Middle Ages: Ideal and Reality’ in F.L. Cheyette, ed., Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe (1968)
Flori, J., ‘Knightly society’ in The New Cambridge Medieval History, IV (2004)
Bumke, J., The Concept of Knighthood in the Middle Ages (1982)
Contamine, P., trans, M. Jones, War in the Middle Ages (1984)
Vale, M.G.A., War and Chivalry (1981)
Barber, R., The Knight and Chivalry (1995)
Keen, M., Chivalry (1984)
Crouch, D., William Marshal: Knighthood, War and Chivalry, 1147-1219 (2002)
Ashe, L., and I Patterson, eds, War and Literature (2014)
Jaeger, C. Stephen, The Origins of Courtliness (1985)
Boase, R., The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love (1977)
Camille, M, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (1998)
O’Donoghue, B. The Courtly Love Tradition (1982)
Wack, M. F., Lovesickness in the Middle Ages (Pennsylvania, 1990)
Krueger, R. L., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (2000)
Noble, P.S, Love and Marriage in Chretien de Troyes (1982)
Ariès, P., Western Attitudes to Death from the Middle Ages to the Present (1974)
Borst, A., ‘Three Studies of Death in the Middle Ages’, Medieval Worlds, trans E. Hansen (1991)
Binski, P., Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (1996)
Tristram, P., Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (1976)
Sing me the songs of your people
Creative Commons license
Home Page by Ladies of the Knight is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 Unported license.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from Ladies of the Knight.