Barnhouse R. The Book of the Knight of the Tower. Manners for Young Medieval Women

Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. — 251 p.In 1372 a French knight compiled a book of stories to teach his daughters how to be good wives and good Christians. The book was popular in his own century and the next, in France, in Germany, and in England. In the fifteenth century, William Caxton translated it into Middle English and used the technology he had recently introduced to Londoners to print an edition of the book. Instead of an aristocratic audience, merchants were his main clientele, people who read the book to discover how to behave more like knights and ladies, and how to make their daughters attractive marriage partners. They also read the stories for the same reason a modern audience might: for what medieval writers called sentence and solas — to learn and to be delighted.