Knighting in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

Abstract

Knighting is a ritual dedicated to creating knights.The concept, therefore, might adequately describe very different sets of physical gestures and spoken words, dedicated to creating different kinds of knights – conceivably, one society’s knighting ritual might not be recognized as such by members of another society. When we as historians seek to decide if a form of knighting existed at a given time and in a given place, we need to keep an open mind. We also inevitably face all the questions connected with ritual on the one hand and with knighthood on the other (including, in the first case, ...