How Did Medieval Literature Mirror — and Shape — the Hierarchies of Its World?

From the epic songs of Roland to the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, medieval literature was never a neutral pastime. It was deeply entangled with the structures of a society that was, by design, hierarchical and immobile. At the summit of the feudal pyramid stood king and nobility, beneath them knights and clergy, and at the bottom the vast mass of peasants. Literature not only mirrored this social stratification but also helped naturalize it, offering stories in which order, duty, and faith appeared as self-evident. At the same time, it opened imaginative spaces where ideals could be reformulated — reshaping, in subtle ways, the cultural imagination of the Middle Ages.

Society Written into Story

In the feudal world, rank was everything. A knight’s attire, a serf’s tools, or a lord’s retinue instantly marked social standing. This logic of visible difference found its way into literature. The noble knight encountering the wild forester, or the feudal lord receiving homage, are stock motifs whose meaning depends on the recognition of hierarchy. Just as the feudal pyramid was sustained through ritualized gestures of honor and service, so too were literary narratives structured by difference and rank. The heroes of epic and romance are never anonymous everymen; they are knights, kings, saints, or martyrs — embodiments of the elite order.

Religion and the Written Word

Another pillar of medieval society was religion, and here too the written word reflected institutional dominance. Monks and clerics were among the few literate classes, and so literature bore the imprint of their worldview. The earliest texts in the vernacular, like the Séquence de Sainte Eulalie (ca. 880), were devotional, written to edify rather than merely entertain. Even when literature shifted toward worldly concerns, the religious discourse remained close at hand. The Chanson de Roland famously casts its traitor Ganelon in typological terms, as a Judas figure, and depicts battles against the Saracens as sacred wars in miniature. In such moments, literature reinforced the Church’s role as cultural arbiter, shaping how audiences imagined both history and morality.

Communication, Mediality, and the Problem of Transmission

Medieval texts were also shaped by their modes of communication. Before Gutenberg’s press, manuscripts were copied by hand, each unique, each prone to scribal error or embellishment. No two copies of a tale were ever quite the same. Oral performance further complicated the matter. Most of the population could not read; stories were sung or recited by jongleurs, often accompanied by simple melodies. The result was a fluid textual world: variants proliferated, verses were repeated or reshaped, and stories adapted themselves to new occasions. Modern scholars call this phenomenon mouvance — the restless movement of the text, neither fixed nor wholly free, always hovering between memory and improvisation.

The Chanson de Geste: Heroism Sung

The chanson de geste (“song of deeds”) exemplifies this oral-epic culture. Rooted in legendary history, sung in ten-syllable lines bound by assonance rather than rhyme, these poems recounted heroic exploits — above all battles in defense of Christendom. They were anonymous, performed by itinerant jongleurs, and less concerned with narrative linearity than with formula, repetition, and ritual. The Chanson de Roland is the best-known example: its laisses (strophic units) overlap, diverge, or repeat, sometimes presenting contradictory versions of the same scene. Narrative progression yields to musical structure, allowing the story to unfold as a tapestry of parallel variations. In this epic form, medieval society projected its militant ideals — loyalty to lord and faith, martyrdom in war — as the highest virtues.

The Courtly Romance: Writing as Differentiation

By the 12th century, however, a new form began to dominate: the courtly romance. Here, oral improvisation gave way to deliberate authorship. Chrétien de Troyes, Hartmann von Aue, and others signed their names to crafted narratives, written in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, full of hypotaxis and complex conjunctions. The roman prided itself on conjointure — the artful weaving of episodes into a coherent whole. If the chanson de geste celebrated collective martial identity, the romance explored individual interiority: desire, honor, and the testing of character through adventure.

The difference was not only formal but also social. Romances were meant for courtly audiences: literate nobles, often women as well as men, who consumed them in manuscript form or had them read aloud in ceremonial settings. To mark this distinction, romance authors frequently disparaged the jongleurs of epic tradition, casting themselves as moral interpreters rather than entertainers. The roman thus became the literary form of the aristocracy, mirroring their values while also refining them — valor became courtesy, conquest became love-service, and brute strength yielded to the testing of inner virtue.

Arthur’s Court and the Ideal of Order

The setting of many romances — the court of King Arthur — offered an exemplary stage for this transformation. Arthur’s hall is imagined as a space of perfection, elegance, and refined custom, a mirror of what feudal order ought to be. Yet it is precisely this order that must be tested by disruption: an insult, a challenge, a mysterious stranger. The knight who departs on adventure does so to restore what was disturbed, embodying in miniature the cycle of loss and recovery that defines both romance structure and social ideal. Even here, the story reaffirms hierarchy: Arthur reigns, knights prove themselves, ladies arbitrate value. Literature projects an idealized pyramid of order that reality could rarely sustain.

Mirror and Shaper

So how did medieval literature mirror and shape the hierarchies of its world? The answer lies in the double movement of reflection and reinvention. The chanson de geste exalted collective martial devotion and fidelity to rank, offering audiences models of sacrifice and loyalty. The romance refined those ideals into a courtly ethic, cultivating self-discipline, courtesy, and interiority. Both genres translated the rigid structures of feudal society into narrative form, but they also reshaped those structures, elevating them into ideals that real life often failed to reach.

In this sense, medieval literature was never only descriptive. It was prescriptive, didactic, and aspirational. It made visible the social order — with its lords, knights, clergy, and peasants — and simultaneously endowed it with a transcendent sheen. To read or hear these stories in the Middle Ages was not merely to be entertained, but to be instructed in how the world was, and perhaps more importantly, how it ought to be