Description
Book SynopsisWith steady erudition and not infrequent irreverence, Stephanie Trigg ranges from medieval romance to Victorian caricature, from imperial politics to medievalism in contemporary culture, to write a strikingly original cultural history of the Order of the Garter.
Trade Review"Trigg's combination of chronological and thematic approaches results in a dynamic study. Rather than a merely biographical or celebratory work, this history of a medieval chivalric order offers a history of medievalism itself, which ingeniously reveals how the slipperiness of the Order's motto allows it to function as a touchstone for each epoch's world view. The motto recalls a moment whose meaning was transformed by a king's words, but the words themselves would take on new and varied meanings in the centuries to come. And like the Order's motto, Stephanie Trigg's book urges us to be aware of what our attitudes towards medieval alterity reveal about ourselves." *
Times Literary Supplement *
"Because of its theoretical expansiveness, Trigg's invaluable contribution to the history of the Garter should prove of interest to scholars with a wide range of interests, and demonstrates that the still-developing fields of ritual criticism and medievalism studies have much to offer one another." *
Comitatus *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
PART I. RITUAL HISTORIES
Chapter 1. Ritual Theory and Medievalism
Chapter 2. Origins: Motto, Emblem, and Myth
Chapter 3. Histories: Love, Honor, and Medievalism
PART II. RITUAL PRACTICES
Chapter 4. Honor, Shame, and Degradation
Chapter 5. Ritual, Change, and Tradition
Chapter 6. Bodies, Clothes, and Medievalism
PART III. RITUAL MODERNITIES
Chapter 7. Royalty and Medievalism, Medieval to Postmodern
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
