The courtly romance is the literary attempt, undertaken by a class which had gained cultural dominance, to justify its position within medieval society. It does this largely by idealising the desirability and feasibility of the concerns of knighthood, amongst which we are hardly surprised to find the profession of arms. Courtly literature therefore legitimises knighthood by optimistically granting it in art a success which did not always come its way in life and by largely glossing over the difficulties encountered and objections raised. We find this self-idealisation present from the beginnings of the new genre, in Hartmann's Erec, where numerous stylised devices are employed to make this flattering depiction of chivalry aesthetically acceptable. Is it likely, in view of this tendency, that authors so concerned to idealise knighthood would also have been ready to admit critical doubts and to relativise the kind of picture which we find in this first Arthurian romance? Is it conceivable that, alongside their manifest wish to legitimise chivalry, these authors may also have applied irony to this theme?

Realistic details

This objection may be met in part by the reminder that the medieval romance is a complex phenomenon, that it finds room for realistic details within an idealising framework, and that its critical self-awareness does not stop short of a scrutiny of what it holds dearest. Accordingly, it is not difficult to collect examples where poets make use of the potentialities of irony even in a chivalric context.