ИСТИНА

The medieval knighthood that has been attracting attention of historians, linguists and literary critics for centuries is a complicated phenomenon of military and Christian ethics, feudal society and literary representation. The latter is no less important for understanding its philosophy as the first two ones are. The chivalric romances of which the most prominent place is taken by Malory’s work (1485), gave credibility to the detailed classification of knightly virtues in later decades. The opposition of a good and a bad knight is created through the category of negation being linguistically analyzed on various levels: lexical, morphological, syntactical. It allows the author not only to picture the bad, but also to stress and evaluate the ideal. Negation turns out to be not a distinct logical counterpart of positive utterances, but a powerful tool for featuring knighthood as a socially and ethically important endeavour. The presentation will show how it works in the text of “Le Morte Darthur” in relation to various characters including women.