things I need to organize

Just mentally. The organization of the rest of my life would take more than just a blog to deal with.

- the early 1330's were characterized in part by a nostalgia for Edward I (the Longshanks of Braveheart fame). This entailed:
- a return to legal proceedings and court eyres as in Edward I's time
- a heightened cultural standing for the concept of knighthood
- knighthood under Edward I had been very prestigious due to Edward's conscious manipulation of Arthurian style jousts, etc.

-Knights were forming the beginnings of the representative parliament and thus were very active in legal proceedings

-Therefore if we take the manuscript as being an analog to the legal custumals such as the liber Horn, placing the knight on a high moral pedestal with an internalized, self-correcting morality would help create the ideal of the sort of person who would be most fit to be judge or representative

-Furthermore, by privileging the individual sense of morality by systematically denying the role of the clerical figures, the manuscript could also be arguing for the primacy of secular courts over their clerical counterparts, in a sense saying that secular courts should be in control for all matters of justice and the clerical courts would be essentially unnecessary in most matters.

-The upshot of this is that through this manuscript we can see the nascent and increasing divide between secular and sacred social arenas when they had before been more intertwined.





UGH. Must get this all straightened out somehow so's I can relink my chapter outlines so's I can send this out tomorrow....