Abstract

Armed combat was a central element in medieval chivalry, the very test of a knight's fitness and worth. The juridical duel, too, was the ordeal which before all others involved considerations of rank and dignity. Whilst the different ordeals encountered regular opposition from various points of view, the first specific rejection of trial by combat in German vernacular literature is usually held to occur in the fifteenth-century didactic satire, Der Ring of Heinrich Wittenweiler. A reading of Diu Crône of Heinrich von dem Türlein suggests, however, that trial by combat was in fact repudiated some-what earlier, and moreover on the unusual grounds that it jeopardized aristocratic dignity. Indeed throughout this courtly romance the chivalric feat of arms is treated with such a tone of disrespect that chivalry itself appears debased in the very genre whose function was to legitimate the values of knighthood. jQuery.click { event.preventDefault(); })