THE AUTHOR HAD NOT HAD CONTACT with writings about King Arthur's court and ideas of chivalry and the Troubadours since college days. Her fancied recall was that chivalry had to do with moral and ethical judgments of that time. Not so, and the brief review of the setting of the Arthurian legends (which were written in poetry, as were all recorded works of the time), perhaps indicates why this was not so. But these tales of the fantastic, mythic, and preternatural did give indication of the chivalric code: courage, devotion to liege, and acceptance of chivalric rules. Whether they had anything to do with 'romance' as we know it now, or worshipful respect of women, can perhaps be inferred from an examination of the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Chivalry embodied the ideals of the nobility, and was expressed in the narrative of the romance—the expressive medium of the Knights in the period of "Middle English"—from the 12th to the