ABSTRACT
Historians of medieval and early modern Europe have been struggling for a long time to find the best way to characterise most appropriately the vivid variety they encounter in the documents that reveal the texture of life in those periods. Some historians have eschewed the political, legal, institutional and philological approaches that prevailed earlier and still command allegiance in many quarters, and have turned instead to the concept of everyday life. After the emergence of court culture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, churchmen did their best to contribute to the civilising of knightly elites. Christianity's negative judgement on earthly bodily pleasures gave rise during the Middle Ages to various attempts to repress, sublimate and civilise them according to ascetic principles. Norbert Elias has briefly analysed how in Germany courtly rites of civilised conduct tended to become a kind of all-embracing moral programme voiced by scholars, preachers, schoolmasters and bourgeois.
