The Rites of Knighthood

The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry by Richard C. McCoy examines how the ceremonial culture of Elizabethan chivalry both mediated and exposed tensions at the heart of Tudor politics. Focusing on the careers of the Earl of Leicester, Sir Philip Sidney, and the Earl of Essex, McCoy shows how tournaments, tilts, and other courtly performances were more than rituals of devotion to the crown: they became arenas in which aristocratic ambition, militarism, and claims of “customary rights” were dramatized against royal authority. From Bullingbrook’s challenge in *Richard II* to Essex’s abortive rebellion, McCoy traces the ways in which chivalric “rites” embodied unresolved conflicts between honor and obedience, producing ceremonies that could temporarily balance crown and nobility but also threaten to destabilize the Elizabethan polity.

Alongside historical events, McCoy analyzes the literature of Elizabethan chivalry, from masques and tournament devices by George Gascoigne, Francis Bacon, and others to the grander poetic projects of Samuel Daniel, Edmund Spenser, and Shakespeare. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s concept of symbolic action, he situates these texts as cultural strategies that attempted to reconcile political contradictions—even when they failed or were overwhelmed by the realities of faction and rebellion. Daniel’s *Civil Wars* falters under the weight of contemporary conflict, while Spenser’s *Faerie Queene* more successfully transforms ideological contradictions into symbolic syntheses. Shakespeare’s histories, too, dramatize chivalry’s ambivalence, at once affirming royal power and highlighting aristocratic resistance. By reading Elizabethan chivalry as both ideology and symbolic practice, McCoy reveals how its ceremonies and literature prepared the ground for later constitutional struggles, making this study essential for scholars of early modern literature, political culture, and the intersections of ritual, power, and representation.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.