Honour

A category of Aristotelian derivation (‘Tale è l’onore, il quale è infatti il più grande dei beni esteriori’, Ethica nicomachea, IV, III 10), honour is the ‘prize of virtue’ and is a prerogative of the chivalrous code with which the romantic heroes comply. It is a guiding category within the cultural, civil, and social system of the ancient regime, often associated to glory. Honour traverses chivalrous romance before and after Ariosto, undergoing a conceptual metamorphosis. In Ariosto knights such as Astolfo, Orlando or Ruggiero seek honour in their adventures but are not principally motivated by this virtue. There is no fundamental value in terms of honour in the initiatives of Ariosto’s paladins, who profoundly respect this chivalrous virtue without however considering it a ‘civil virtue’. What animates the knights is indeed love, the true force behind the errant wonderings of the heroes of the Furioso. And it is love that incarnates all the menaces to the knight’s dignity. For Ariosto, the knight, in his heroic dimension, acts in the name of honour in order to win a prize of fame suited to his physical strength, his prestige as a paladin and his faith, but he is continually hindered in the maintenance of this chivalrous virtue by certain unforeseeable external elements like the menace of love, the menace of folly, the continuous deviations, deceits, and simulations, the selfsame break-up of heroic adventure.

Andrea Alciato, Emblematum liber, Optimus civis, Emblema CXXXV, Paris, Christian Wechel, 1534, p. 110.