Middle Ages Teaches That Chivalry Is Not Dead

Under a twirling disco ball clipped to the basketball net, with the “Get Ready to Rumble” World Wrestling Federation tune playing in the background, modern knights are jousting their way--not with sharp lances, but with pillows and wooden armor shaped like medium-sized pizzas.

The T-shirt and jeans-clad Mesa Verde Middle School warriors, often giggling uncontrollably, were trying desperately to knock opponents off narrow wooden beams.

The adrenaline-releasing reward came Friday for completing good deeds as a chivalrous knight would have, part of a nearly monthlong history project to learn about the Middle Ages, the period of European history from about the late 5th century to the middle of the 15th century.

More than 300 seventh-graders pretended to live the times--without the crude lifestyle and blood-shedding brutality of the olden days.

“It’s a cleaner and sterilized version” than the first half of the Middle Ages, known as the Dark Ages, said Principal Lynn Edmonds, who wanted the students to learn from the positive images of knights.

Rather than fighting in the battlefields to become knights, the students were required to collect five perishable goods for a local charity, gather 25 aluminum cans to raise money for their library and make a sacred vow to the teacher such as “I will complete all homework for a week.”

“The emphasis on this whole thing was to do good deeds, acts of service for the community and for the school,” said history teacher David Moore, who started the project at the campus four years ago. “The knight’s job was to be a professional soldier, but they had to live by a code of chivalry.”

It’s not the knight of the early Middle Ages they were imitating, but more the romanticized version of knights in the late Middle Ages.

Just as well: Medieval knights were usually illiterate, didn’t bathe often and had violent habits.

“They were military people, hard-bitten, hard-riding military figures,” said Paul Knoll, a professor of medieval history at the University of Southern California. “And only later in the Middle Ages is there any degree of refinement and civility that begins to settle in the tradition of the courts.”

Paul Hanson, history department chairman at Cal Lutheran University, agreed that the romanticized image provides a better role model for students.

“That’s probably the better knight to emulate,” Hanson said.

The shining image knights have today “comes out of the romance literature and the courtly literature of the Arthurian legend, but that’s a very idealized picture that didn’t reflect reality, Knoll said. “It’s far too refined.”

Historians argue that the knights’ courtly manners came after they had lost their practical value as fighters on horses with the advent of such weapons as cannons and crossbows.

Many students at Mesa Verde said they were aware of both the image and reality of knights.

When 13-year-old Mike Sistak pictures a knight, he sees “someone in big shining armor with a sword and on a horse.” But in reality, he says, “They would be big brutes. They were all cutting each other up.”

Many of the girls, however, say they don’t care to have things the way they were in the olden days. Girls, they say, can be knights just as well as or better than boys. They dismiss therole of damsel in distress played by women in the past.

A female knight “should have courage and she should believe in herself, that she can do things without someone trying to save her,” said 12-year-old Dena Tartamella. “She can work independently without being saved by a guy. Yeah. Girl power.”