Every Daughter Deserves A Gentleman: How to Master Gentlemanly Behavior and Become a Gentleman

Foreword – Welcome to Fratire Publishing

So, what is fratire you ask?

Fratire is a combination of the words fraternity and satire. It represents a new genre of literature that uses in your face satire to make a point and at the same time do it from a tough love approach that respects the fraternal kinship of human nature. It's also about common sense books for common sense people and places more emphasis on the practical side of changing human behavior for the better, even if our feelings get hurt a little along the way.

Fratire Publishing format and content style is a mastery of presentation, organization, ease of use straight forward facts and quick summaries. Strategically, we use a lot of statistics to make a point or show a comparison from a global perspective. However, we also recognize that every person must be treated with equal opportunity and fairness, free of bias and prejudices, and seen as a unique individual, like no other.

Our approach is about relevant books for sapient beings covering a range of useful and timely topics and practical knowledge. As a self-publisher and Founder and President of Fratire Publishing, my mission and goal in life to provide common sense books and how-to guides to help everyday people navigate safely through the many hazards of life, be it dating, character building, or philosophical perspectives.

Our vision of Sapience is becoming a person of/or showing great wisdom and sound judgment, and our mission is taking action to advance society with personal intelligence and enlightenment as well as working now and together with others; to make the world a better place. If this sounds like you and you can never have enough common sense, wisdom and relevancy, then come and visit us and learn more at www.FratirePublishing.com.

Previously, I wrote So You Want to Date My Daughter? A Father’s Rulebook on the Do’s and Don’ts of Dating His Little Princess. However, more needed to be done regarding gentlemanly and ladylike dating behavior, so I saw the need to write two companion books, Every Daughter Deserves a Gentleman which seems like a logical extension of the first one and Every Son Deserves a Lady as well because sons deserve ladies just as much as daughters deserve gentlemen. On top of that, Fratire Publishing is donating ten-percent of these book’s sales to the Times Up Now organization to help prevent sexual harassment and misogyny.

Want to be part of the solution to help end the problem of sexual harassment and misogynistic behavior? If the answer is yes, here is how you can help by igniting a national petition for a presidential proclamation to make every April the National Be a Gentleman and Lady Month Program and Proclamation. Ultimately, the goal of course is to practice gentlemanly and ladylike qualities every month, week and day of the year 365/24/7.

To learn more about becoming a sponsor, please visit our website at: www.gentlemanandlady.com. For more information about companion books for this program, Every Daughter Deserves A Gentleman and Every Son Deserves A Lady please visit the Fratire Publishing website at www.fratirepublishing.com/gentleman-and-lady and complete a short contact form to be added to our subscriber list.

Preface – Why I Wrote This Book

It struck me odd one day as I picked up my daughter’s friends at her middle school to go roller skating that one of the boys to be picked up was sagging! He was not one of my daughter’s regular friends, and yet there he was waiting his turn to enter my SUV with the other kids. But that didn’t happen! Firmly and calmly, I announced to him that I have a strict no sagging policy for riding in my car. Without hesitating, he hiked his pants up and tightened his belt, and he was gladly accepted into the back seat of my car with the other kids.

I never saw the boy ever again, but I continue to see to this day the stupefaction of sagging and believe this is the most intolerable dressing snafus a teenage boy and adolescent can make. And let’s not forget also making a fool of yourself and portraying a host of negative, obscene and anti-social statements. Sagging and the gangsta’ lifestyle that is associated with it is the scourge of civilized society and the antithesis to gentlemanly dress and behavior. You can’t get much lower that, just like their pants, all pun intended. To this day, I’m still amazed as to how low can you go?

That incident was the driving force to writing this companion book to So You Want to Date My Daughter? A Father’s Rulebook on the Do’s and Don’ts for Dating His Little Princess, and I hope it clarifies without a doubt as to why every daughter deserves a gentleman and why her dates should be one. This book, Every Daughter Deserves a Gentleman: How to Master Gentlemanly Behavior & Become a Gentleman, does just that by elevating the cause and purpose of gentlemanly behavior and etiquette to a higher level for the benefit of all daughters; teenage and adolescent girls, and young adult women. 

This book’s purpose is trifold by acting firstly as a useful guide for parents with helping them educate, guide and nurture their daughters to dating gentleman. Secondly, it’s designed to show their daughters what a gentleman is, how they behave, and why they deserve one. And lastly, for the benefit of the dating candidates, it teaches them what’s expected of a gentlemen suitor and how to be one. 

By using this trifecta approach between parent, daughter and gentleman; each will better understand what their roles are and help ensure between them that every daughter deserves, and dates, a gentleman.

Yours truly,

Corey Lee Wilson

Author & Publisher

1 – Brief History of Chivalry, Courtly Love and Gentlemanly Behavior

Chivalry and courtly love remain potent in the development of the modern gentleman and can be viewed as a much-needed, ongoing revolutionary force leading to the reform of the institution of marriage on a global scale. Western European chivalry in particular, is distinctive for its interconnection with courtly love.

From Jennifer G. Wollock’s monumental book Rethinking Chivalry and Courtly Love, the intertwined stories of chivalry, courtly love and gentlemanly behavior are often told as narratives of rise, decadence, decline, revival, and ultimate disillusionment, depending on who you ask. Regardless of your sentiment, it cannot be denied that both chivalry and courtly love draw on systems of masculine (and feminine) honor that underlie gender-based honor concepts still current today and provide the foundation for gentlemanly behavior and romantic love.

The word chivalry was first used to mean something like horsemanship or equitation. In most major European languages, the knight is a rider, chevalier, caballero or ritter. Chivalry is a grafted tree, with deep roots extending well beyond the history of the Western Middle Ages or of Christianity. Like the grafted tree of European folklore and romance, it has strange powers to bring inhabitants of different worlds together.

Chivalry is still a magical word in Western civilization, but one that is still too often misunderstood. The term itself has been used to mean everything from a collective noun denoting knights (armored mounted warriors) as a social class, to the ideal of conduct developed for that class, to the imitation of that ideal by others from across the social order. For some, chivalry is pernicious nonsense; for many others, it remains a robust and glorious ideal.

Chivalry

Chivalry draws on verbal and written traditions of mounted warrior ethics that go back in time across the Eurasian continent and North Africa. The ideals of chivalry were popularized in medieval literature, especially the Matter of Britain and Matter of France, the former based on Geoffrey of Monmouth‘s Historia Regum Britanniae which introduced the legend of King Arthur, written in the 1130s.

Fans of chivalry have assumed since the late medieval period there was a time in the past when chivalry was a living institution. When men acted chivalrously and chivalry was alive and not dead, and the imitation of that period would much improve the present. This is the mad mission of Don Quixote, protagonist of the most chivalric novel of all time and inspirer of the chivalry of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe to restore the age of chivalry, and thereby improve his country. It’s a version of the myth of the Golden Age of Chivalry and so are the others.

Looking back beyond the blossoming of chivalry and the emergence of the term itself in the twelfth century as an informal, varying code of conduct; chivalry reached its apex between 1170 and 1220. However, it was never decided on or summarized in a single document, associated with the medieval institution of knighthood. Together with chivalric romances, tournaments, ceremonies, heraldry, and all the ceremony of the high medieval chivalric experience, there were earlier influences from Arabia.

Medieval Europe, particularly Spanish poets, were greatly influenced by Arabic literature, particularly during Islam’s early expansion. The literature of chivalry, bravery, figurative expression, and imagery made its way to Western literature through Arabic literature in Andalusia. The famous Spanish author Vicente Blasco says:

Europe did not know chivalry, or its adopted literature or sense of honor before the arrival of Arabs in Andalusia and the wide presence of their knights and heroes in the countries of the south.

Over time, its meaning in Europe has been refined to emphasize the social and moral virtues more generally. The code of chivalry, as it stood in the late Middle Ages, was a moral system which combined a warrior ethos, knightly piety, and courtly manners, all conspiring to establish a notion of honor and nobility.

Classical Chivalry and Medieval Knights

The biblical ethics of war were an important precursor of Western chivalric ideals and in some cases a direct source of inspiration. Among the laws of war codified in the book of Deuteronomy, where they appear in Chapters 20 and 21, we find rules for the humane treatment of captive women (21:10-14), safeguards for the environment in a war zone (stress is laid on not cutting down fruit trees) (20:19-20), and guidelines for selecting suitable combatants. "

Later European knights looking for biblical role models would zero in on the biblical King David, on Moses's successor Joshua, and especially Judah Maccabee as the Three Jewish Worthies. Joshua was admired for his leadership as the children of Israel left the wilderness and crossed into the Promised Land. Later Christian and Muslim writers saw David as a successful and heroic general and precursor to the knightly persona.

The earliest known image of a mounted knight in plate armor and holding a lance appears on a relief from Taq-1-Bostan, Iran, that also depicts Ardashir II and the figure is startlingly reminiscent of a fourteenth-century Western knight in full tournament gear. Furthermore, this early Persian cavalry is the too often neglected prototype for the rise of mounted combat and chivalric culture, first in Central Asia, then spreading out in all directions from the old Sassanian empire.

The Crusades and contact with Islam have long been credited as precipitating factors in the development of western chivalry. The military orders of the crusades (both Christian and Muslim) in this period came to be seen as the earliest flowering of chivalry. It remains unclear to what extent they behaved according to existing models of conduct along the lines of the chivalry ideal that was prevalent in the Middle Ages or improved upon them.

Nevertheless, chivalry and crusades were not the same thing. While the crusading ideology had largely influenced the ethic of chivalry during its formative times, chivalry itself was related to a whole range of martial activities and aristocratic values which had no necessary linkage with crusading. However, the tales of the Knights Templar live on to this day with a big following.

The Nine Worthies of Chivalry

When the French minstrel Jacques de Longuyon, continuing in the tradition of romances centered on Alexander the Great, invented the chivalric pantheon of the Nine Worthies around 1310, he gave proof of the influence of pre-chivalric traditions on the knighthood of his day. Biblical Judaism, ancient Greece and Rome, and the early Middle Ages were all filtered through the lens of chivalry, and the nine greatest chivalric heroes of world history were selected from those periods.

Of Jacques de Longuyon's Nine Worthies, three are drawn from the history of Greece and Rome, three are from the Hebrew Bible, and three are from Christian tradition. Today, heroes like the Trojan Hector, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar are not so remembered as exponents of chivalry, but more so as great military leaders with heroic prowess.

Neither do readers today think of Joshua, King David, or Judah Maccabee as models of knighthood, but that is how the knights of the Middle Ages came to regard them. Of course, when it comes to the Christian worthies, King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon of the First Crusade, the chivalric connections become much clearer.

Classical Greece gave the Middle Ages two of its three ancient pagan worthies, Hector and Alexander the Great, both figures with powerful links to the Near East and Asian culture. It also supplied the ethical philosophy of Aristotle, which would influence theorists of chivalry through the emerging cathedral schools and universities of the twelfth century. The emphasis on moderation in chivalric literature draws on Aristotle's version of the Golden Mean; the desirable middle between two extremes.

At the time the Nine Worthies were written in Europe, they didn’t include other worthy candidates of chivalry, and these knightly legends are noted below. However, the terms knight and knightly are used loosely here as a broad term, and they are not necessarily the same as the Western European model.

Arabian Traditions as the Source of European Chivalry

In Old Arabic, the alternative word for Chivalry (Furúsiyyah as horsemanship) is also the word for Virtue and Honor (Múruwwa as chivalric values). These ancient chivalric virtues were transferred by the Moors, who comprised the majority population of the Iberian Peninsula by 1100 AD, and their brand of Chivalry quickly spread throughout Europe.

In particular, the ethical and romantic characteristic of Chivalry (Furúsiyyah) as practiced in the Arabian Peninsula, evolved and spread with the Muslim expansion. The knight-errantry; the riding forth on horseback in search of adventures, the rescue of captive maidens, the assistance rendered everywhere to women in adversity; all these were essentially Arabian ideas, like the romantic tales in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

Other Traditions of Chivalry Throughout the World

The ancient world did not know chivalry in the specific medieval Christianized Western form that we recognize today, but it did recognize an active sense of honor among warriors. Warrior-kings and chieftains were the heroes of the Celtic, Germanic, Arabic, African, and Asian tribesmen who poured across the Asian continent into Europe throughout ancient and classical history.

In India, the Kshatriya (warrior) class in the Sanskrit era of Hindu traditions and its relation to the Brahman (priesthood) and the rest of society preoccupied ancient Indian thinkers regarding heroic values. The Bhagavad Gita (or Gita for short) is set in a narrative framework of a dialogue between the Pandava prince Arjuna and his guide and charioteer Lord Krishna and the dispute between the two parties in the book of Mahabharata centers on the question how to define the laws of heroism.

Wuxia, which literally means martial heroes, is a genre of Chinese fiction concerning the adventures of martial artists in ancient China. The word wuxia is a compound composed of the elements wu (literally martial, military, or armed) and xia (literally honorable, chivalrous, or hero). A martial artist who follows the code of xia is often referred to as a xiake (literally follower of xia) or youxia (literally wandering xia). In some translations, the martial artist is referred to as a swordsman or swordswoman even though he or she may not necessarily wield a sword.

The original Chinese term of samurai also recalls the origins of the Japanese warrior as one who serves. Furthermore, the recent term of Bushido interprets the samurai code of behavior and how chivalrous men should act in their personal and professional lives and the emphasis on compassion, benevolence, and the other non-martial qualities of true manliness and builds on extraordinary thousand-year-old precepts of manhood that originated in chivalrous behavior on the part of some, though certainly not all, samurai. 

The Mass Appeal of Chivalry and Courtly Love

The history of chivalry and courtly love is still being written. In popular culture worldwide, the influence of heroes drawn from medieval romance continues to be substantial. The global popularity of men of action films like James Bond and others as well as the martial arts films and comic book superheroes in various forms of shining armor, is rooted in the same needs that inspired the literature of Western medieval love and war.

Chivalry and courtly love remain potent in the human psyche and as previously noted neither chivalry nor courtly love are exclusively a Western European phenomena. Furthermore, no living culture is a self-contained entity, walled off from contact with other cultures, though its citizens may like to imagine their way of life as unique and mandated by heaven. The present analysis of the history of chivalry and courtly love stresses the cultural interchanges out of which these ideals grew.

The quest for the Golden Age of Chivalry that has preoccupied so many historians and chivalric chroniclers is seen as a futile effort on the part of historians. Nonetheless, rejecting our chivalric heritage is also a hazardous delusion. In fact, the Golden Age of Chivalry is itself a chivalric myth, often discussed in chivalric literature, and has been recognized as such. Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale describes the age of King Arthur as a kind of chivalric utopia, and other courts and eras had their advocates. This needs to be seen as a fictional motif.

It has also been a mistake, surprising though this may at first sound, to confine the study of chivalry to the knightly classes and the aristocracy or gentry. The code of professional conduct developed in the West by and for knights is linked to standards of conduct not only for ladies but for other orders of society. In the Islamic world, the Sufi concept of chivalry extended to craftsmen and other organizations and encouraged the formation of craft guilds.

The connection of the Knights Templar to the development of the free guild system in France and to the operative precursors of Freemasonry may be a Western manifestation of the same phenomenon. The chivalric elements of the early Robin Hood ballads also seem to reflect the same extension of chivalric principles to the yeoman class that often supplied the archers and men-at-arms of the English armies of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The ongoing