The Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man's Guide to Chivalry

At a time of astonishing confusion about what it means to be a man Brad Miner has recovered the oldest and best ideal of manhood: the gentleman. Reviving a thousand-year tradition of chivalry honor and heroism The Compleat Gentleman provides the essential model for twenty-first-century masculinity. Despite our confusion real manhood is not complicated. It is an ancient ideal based on service to ones God country family and friendsa simple but arduous ideal worthy of a lifetime of struggle. Miners gentleman stands out for his dignity restraint and discernment. He rejects the notion that one way of behaving is as good as another. He belongs to an aristocracy of virtue not of wealth or birth. Proposing neither a club nor a movement Miner describes a lofty code of manly conduct which far from threatening democracy is necessary for its survival. Miner traces the concept of manliness from the jousting fields of the twelfth century to the decks of the Titanic. The three masculine archetypes that emergethe warrior the lover and the monkcombine in the character of the "compleat gentleman." This modern knight cultivates a martial spirit in defense of the true and the beautiful. He treats the opposite sex with the passionate respect required by courtly love. And he values learning in the pursuit of truthall with the discretion decorum and nonchalance that the Renaissance called sprezzatura. The Compleat Gentleman is filled with examples from the past and the present of the man our increasingly uncivilized age demands.