SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

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conflicting demands of love and honor: Love that encourages a knight’s prowess
and increases his honor is commendable; any excess of passion that hinders the
knight’s quest for honor must be controlled by marriage. . . . Even more critical of
the Round Table is the tale of the Sangreal, in which Malory upholds the
traditional union of Christianity and chivalry and finds Lancelot, the best knight
in the world, lacking in fortitude and stability. (208)
Honor, then, is the appropriate path for a knight; similarly, the Confessio Amantis tales
related by Genius exemplify the proper response of the king, i.e. humility as an answer to
pride and charity as the answer to envy. Cherewatuk’s assessment addresses the same
excess of passion shared by the characters in Gower’s tales.
Helen Cooper finds that fifteenth-century romance often pursues “a fantasy of
high chivalry that disguise[s] the moribundity of its underlying ideology” (143). In
contrast to the fond remembrance of chivalry the way it used to be, contemporaneous
events must certainly have shaken the beliefs of those who lived through them. The
Hundred Years’ War, which so concerned Gower, has been tagged as particularly
ferocious war of a type previously unseen in England;
the honest yeoman of Edward III's time had evolved into a professional soldier of
fortune, and had been demoralized by the prolonged and dismal Hundred Years’
War, at the close of which many thousands of ruffians, whose occupation had
gone, had been let loose in England. At the same time the power of feudalism had
become concentrated in the hands of a few great lords, who were wealthy enough
and powerful enough to become king-makers. The disbanded mercenaries enlisted
indifferently on either side, corrupting the ordinary feudal tenantry with the evil
habits of the French wars, and pillaged the countryside, with accompaniments of
murder and violence, wherever they went. (“Roses, Wars”)
It may be that 15 th century Englishmen found similarities between their time and this
earlier unsettled time. The Hundred Years’ War ended it 1453, but the Wars of the