Arno Borst, in the essay "Knighthood in the High Middle Ages," tries to describe what knighthood was and was not, and compares the real and the ideal elements of knighthood. What he finds is that there were many different forms of knighthood in reality, depending on the nation and the sociohistorical factors at work in that nation, but at the same time there were similarities among those different forms. Borst says that the ideal knight never existed in reality, but the real knight was good enough to provide standards today for virtuous behavior. It is in this last claim that Borst seems to be reaching too far to make the knight of the Middle Ages relevant for contemporary society.
The author effectively portrays the various types of knight in the medieval era, and to differentiate the real and ideal knights. He says "there never existed in the High Middle Ages a general, binding ideal of chivalry. The expert swordsman, the gallant knight, the courtly knight, the Christian knight are contradictory motifs" (183). What Borst fails to note in his appreciation of these various knights, is that they are all variations on an ideal. If the overall knight-in-general ideal did not exist, then certainly the ideal gallant knight, the ideal courtly knight, and the ideal Christian knight did not exist either.
If Borst wants us to properly appreciate the virtuous standards which the knight provides for us today, he should have left a few details out of his description of those wonderful knights, such as: "The knight loves battle and bloody slaughter in which he finds glory and loot" (184). Yet when Borst summarizes the various "motifs of knighthood," he remembers what he wants and forgets the rest:
All these motifs . . . stem from the striving of the noble stratum, caught between lordship and service, to erect a higher ethos that would correspond to its real situation and enhance it: the noble giving service to God, to his overlord, to h...