Title: The custom of the castle
First published: 1996
Description: The "custom of the castle" imposes strange ordeals on knights and ladies seeking hospitality - daunting, mostly evil challenges that travelers must obey or even defend. This seemingly fantastic motif, first conceived by Chretien de Troyes in the twelfth century and widely imitated in medieval French romance, flowered again when Italian and English authors adopted it during the century before Shakespeare's plays and the rise of the novel.

Unlike other scholars who have dismissed it as pure literary convention, Charles Ross finds serious social purpose behind the custom of the castle. Ross explores the changing legal and cultural conceptions of custom in France, Italy, and England to uncover a broad array of moral issues in the many castle stories, where others have seen no more than a fanciful heroic test or an expression of courtly ideology.
Subjects: English literature, Manners and customs in literature, Knights and knighthood in literature, Knowledge, History and criticism, European influences, Castles in literature, Manners and customs, Kings and rulers in literature, Literature and society, Literature andsociety, Shakespeare, william, 1564-1616, knowledge and learning, English literature, history and criticism, early modern, 1500-1700, Social life and customs, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Literary, Early modern, English, Languages & Literatures, Faerie queene (Spenser, Edmund), Morte d'Arthur (Malory, Thomas, Sir), Knowledge and learning
People: Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599), William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Thomas Malory Sir (15th cent)
Time periods: Early modern, 1500-1700