It explains that the maintenance of the “spirit of gentleman” was necessary to defend a political order in 1688 against what Burke saw as the rationalist levelling tendencies of 1789, emphasizing masculinity as central to the age of chivalry. It states that a newly triumphant Whig political culture thus made the moral and aesthetic tastes of aristocratic gentlemen central to sustaining aristocratic hegemony in the age of chivalry. A study of the cultural, political, and religious dimensions of crusading and chivalry, and their impact on medieval Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations.

148.242 The Age of Chivalry and Crusades (15 credits). It further notes that Edmund Burke trumpeted the masculinist aristocratic political culture that triumphed in 1688 and reigned until the extension of suffrage to middle-class men in 1832. Return to course offering list for 148.242. It notes that in Burke's Whig ideology, the “manly sentiment” nursed by the delight and splendor of the queen “kept alive” aristocratic hegemony in eighteenth-century political culture.

This chapter outlines the ways in which eighteenth-century aristocrats appropriated oppositional ideologies in order to legitimate their own position atop the social, political, and economic hierarchy.

The age of chivalry