The adherence of the medieval aristocracy to a common set of ideals that transcended the boundaries of kingdom and language is a commonplace for political, cultural, and intellectual historians of the period. But, as Claudia Wittig demonstrates, it was not merely specific ideals that helped noblemen and noblewomen define their social superiority as a group, but the very process of acquiring this ethos in the first place. Moral education refers to the teaching and learning of both inner values and (perhaps especially) their more tangible outer expression as behavioral norms--what, together, may be termed virtue. This instruction became, over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a shared experience that marked members of the aristocratic in-club. While Wittig notes that much of this education would have taken place orally and experientially, a growing body of didactic literature came to mirror, supplement, and in some contexts even to substitute for these in-person exchanges. The impressive corpus of texts available to us as historians can therefore not only open a window onto wider discourses of moral education, but was “symptomatic” (29) of the evolution of its function in the social legitimation of lay aristocracies. Focusing primarily on France, the Empire, and England (though with cross-references to materials from further afield), Wittig argues that access to moral knowledge became essential to both individual noble ambitions and to their collective hegemony. Their demand for this instruction developed in tandem with innovations in how it was disseminated and applied in specific contexts while consolidating a hierarchical worldview.
In her introduction, Wittig situates her material at the intersection of developments in western European history both socio-cultural (e.g., the rise of noble knighthood as a status marker) and intellectual (e.g., an increasing emphasis on the importance of individual effort in the acquisition of virtue). While previous historiography has discussed the development and dissemination of chivalric and courtly ideals, Wittig suggests that we can use prescriptive texts to better understand how the moral dimensions of these ideologies were actually received across the high medieval nobility as they educated themselves into a distinct social class.
The first chapter places moral education into the different pedagogical contexts available to the nobility. Wittig shows how such teaching, even in its written form, was bound up with a range of interpersonal exchanges--between children and parents or tutors, or within collective learning environments--that underpinned its community-building function. She demonstrates that many moral-didactic texts showed awareness of how they related to the personal experience of individual teachers, while dispensing advice through dynamics already familiar to the learner from spoken exchanges. The immense popularity of such works is reflected in some really quite astonishing manuscript witness statistics for both Latin originals and waves of vernacular translations, all of which enabled a wide circulation among a range of aristocratic audiences throughout a noble’s life. While the advice could be tailored according differences of gender or rank, the net result was a lay aristocracy better able to define and navigate its power within and as a group.
The breadth of communicative tools for moral education is further developed in chapter 2, where Wittig argues that specific textual formats helped foster teacher-pupil relationships in lieu of the “real thing,” thus shedding light on how this model of social authority was understood at the time. Wittig examines both more self-consciously literary formats such as treatises and letters, and texts that mimicked oral communication modes such as sermons and conversations. Each format offered different possibilities for simplifying or organizing its teachings, and for implying more or less hierarchy or interactivity between teacher and pupil. (One cannot help but think of the various “teaching strategies” we deploy in the academy today.) The choices made not only gave aristocratic readers access to moral knowledge but positioned them as part of an orderly society in the process of engaging with that learning.
The structures of society and its moral implications were perhaps no more apparent than at the medieval court, which much of this education was designed to help its learners navigate. Chapter 3 takes the court as a didactic environment in its own right, where nobles learned correct behavior by imitating others and receiving guidance. Absorbing these norms contributed to both a courtier’s individual reputation and the collective legitimation of the aristocracy. Both authors and readers were all too aware, of course, that courts endemically failed to live up to their ideals, but because they functioned as what Wittig calls a “communicative system” for conveying personal status and group identity, it was essential to try as far as possible to bridge image and reality. The constant communication and cultivation of virtue, as the visible manifestation of morality through action, was thus an essential bulwark against courtly shortcomings.
Chapter 4 digs further into the incentives for aristocrats to receive moral teaching by outlining a series of often contrary expectations. In addition to the benefits of salvation, nobles were interested in the need to reconcile honor and pragmatics. Likewise, two aspirational targets developed, the preudome (“honorable man” [or, sometimes, woman]) in general and the chivalric knight specifically. Wittig argues that these models were primarily distinguished not by mere martial prowess, as we might expect, but by the knightly ideal of hardship and service. Women, meanwhile, were taught their own function in upholding male chivalric society through the expression of both modesty and appeal. If moral-didactic texts could and did recognize many of the inherent contradictions of courtly life, their advice for achieving the balancing act served to reinforce the status of nobility itself by confirming the group’s intrinsic moral inclination as well as their capacity to be taught the complex rules of virtue. The process of aristocratic self-actualization bolstered the right social order.
The fifth and final chapter returns to the presentation of didactic material as a pedagogical tool, and so perhaps belongs more in the middle of the book than at the end, as a nice bridge between the variety of formats explored in the first two chapters and the social positioning of aristocratic moral learning discussed later on. The relative merits of poetry versus prose are familiar from other genres, especially history-writing, but played a key role in shaping the development of moral education over this period, especially across translations. Wittig examines the transmission of these texts in compilations that tended to reinforce moral learning as part of a structured, knowable world. Meanwhile, the paratextual and visual apparatus of individual texts--nine illustrations of which are included here--could either reinforce the transition from orality to writing, or take advantage of the written format to organize and communicate moral principles as part of the natural and social order. The format of moral-didactic material, Wittig argues, played a key role in widening accessibility of these teachings across the lay aristocracy.
Wittig concludes with further discussion of the geographical variations in the acquisition of moral learning, which reflected prevailing socio-cultural patterns among the emerging elites in the different areas in her study. The patterns of status and gender that shaped moral education in the high Middle Ages would continue to evolve into the later medieval and early modern periods--but the link between morality and power was already firmly established.
For historians of the medieval aristocracy, this book opens an important window onto the worldview from which our subjects operated. By focusing on not (only) the characteristics of noble virtue but rather its transmission, Wittig demonstrates the appeal of learning morality in a social milieu where, as so often, that morality was regularly violated. This apparent contradiction has contributed to an interpretation wherein the Church sought to impose restraints upon the warrior elite, but the study of moral education suggests that such a value system could only be self-sustaining in the long run with sufficient noble buy-in. Laypeople did not have to be either deeply religious or deeply intellectual to grasp the perceived benefits of personal advancement and group security promised by the moral-didactic texts studied here. The collective social spheres of the aristocratic lifestyle, from the court to the home, made familiarity with virtuous norms a priority as group pressure encouraged nobles to police themselves. The moral field of lay elites, bound up in correct behavior, must be taken seriously as a factor in research on their social, cultural, and political activities.
Likewise, the study of gender among the nobility will benefit from an understanding of how moral norms reinforced structural categorizations. On a basic level, the teaching of virtue helped perpetuate distinctive patterns of behavior for men and women. Late in chapter 4, Wittig moves from the discussion of educational literature to consider how actual high-ranking women could have inspired some of these writers or, in many cases, deviated from the prescriptive ideal. These examples will be familiar to scholars of queenship, though they may be of more use to historians approaching this discussion from other perspectives; a similar consideration of individual men might also have been instructive. By bringing in the moral angle, however, Wittig sheds important light on contemporary awareness of the conflicting demands made on women’s sexuality, and shows how women’s agency was understood as the solution to this dilemma by making them responsible for embracing their expected role. Moreover, because learning morality meant knitting together a complicated aristocratic world, both men and women were expected to contribute to the joyful atmosphere of the court--an unexpectedly emotive dimension to virtue--and to upholding the aristocracy’s social excellence more generally. Wittig’s analysis of these dynamics shows the benefits, and indeed the necessity, of studying noblewomen together with their male counterparts, and vice versa, rather than treating each as a separate topic.
Another strength of this work is its balance of regional specificity with broader trends. The discussion moves freely between different places, an approach justified by the widespread popularity of many moral-didactic texts as well as recurring themes across works produced in various areas. By not tackling each region in succession, and instead paying close attention to the multilingual modes of transmission of this learning, Wittig effectively concretizes how an international chivalric culture was developed and maintained through shared pedagogical experience. At the same time, Wittig repeatedly concludes with distinctive trends linked to particular socio-political developments, such as the emphasis on service in the moral self-fashioning of the generally lower-ranking German knights or the tendency for the French literature to be aimed at the greatest lords. Such variations ultimately help underscore the cross-cultural tendency to equate nobility with morality, and Wittig’s discussion makes clear the potential for pursuing comparative work in moral-didactic trends among aristocracies beyond the medieval West. Conversely, one point deserving clarification is which court was envisaged by these writers: was it always, as seems to be assumed, that of the prince, or could the same principles operate on a more local scale? Such considerations would have interesting implications for the ongoing work on the social and political (de)centralization of medieval European polities.
The material under discussion is complex, but Wittig’s accessible discussion of the social, ideological, and even textual underpinnings of moral education will certainly be of value to researchers and advanced students of elite culture writ large. By giving us a look under the hood, so to speak, of what it meant to be noble, Wittig makes a substantial contribution to the history of power as an aristocratic project.