ABSTRACT
Geoffroy Landry and his clerks composed the Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry to prepare his noble daughters for their future roles as ladies of the court. Drawing together exempla and narratives from a wide range of sources, the text proved quite popular, surviving in over twenty-one French manuscripts and a number of manuscript and printed editions throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and Early Modem period, including one translated and published by William Caxton as the Book of the Knight of the Tower in 1484. The Knight' s Book treats a variety of gendered social behaviors and their consequences: in the providentialist manner of courtesy literature in general, the women in his text are rewarded or punished not only by God in the afterlife, but also in their earthly lives by divine agents with the power to dispense (or deny) success, true love, prosperity, good reputation, and most importantly, a good marriage. Such rewards connect female honor with the containment and control of female sexuality, so that as the text defines and encourages reputable conduct, it also delineates the structures that observe, maintain, and regulate those behaviors befitting the noble status. 1 Landry' s text works concertedly to uphold the external forces that govern the actions o f a noblewoman: her lord, her neighbors, and, most frequently, her God. More importantly, it also seeks to ensure that the noble daughters internalize these behavioral regulations and themselves join the sexual constabulary. In seeking to limit both a woman' s actions and her desires, the text anticipates Foucaultian metaphor as it directs its female auditors to define themselves through the examples of women who remain steadfast--even when the external regulators of family and friends fail-and to place themselves in their own prisons: "The one pryson was loue the other was drede I and the thyrd shame., ,2 That the text attempts all this through an explicitly aristocratic viewpoint, moreover, complicates both the definition and the execution of its ideological task? Emerging from the central dialogue between the Knight and his lady, as well as from the book' s larger collection of moral exempla, is a governing perception of aristocratic life as a
turbulent confluence of public and private spheres with competing mandates for women' s self-regulation. This fundamental duality shapes The Book of the Knight' s explorations of the spiritual consequences of social action, and impels its effort to construct a discourse of sexual conduct that negotiates between the conflicting codes of Christian morality and courtly convention. In so doing, it provides insight into how noble conduct literature influences its actual (though internally repudiated) audience or rather the audience Caxton brought in: women from an ascendant merchant class .
