Honor

This text analyzes the elusive notion of "honour". Drawing on information about Western ideas of honour from sources as diverse as medieval Arthurian romances, Spanish dramas of the 16th and 17th centuries and the writings of German jurists of the 19th and 20th centuries, and comparing the European ideas with the ideas of a non-Western society - the Bedouin - the author argues that honour must be understood as a right, basically a right to respect. He shows that by understanding honour this way, we can resolve some of the paradoxes that have long troubled scholars, and can make sense of certain institutions (for instance, the medieval European pledge of honour) that have not hitherto been properly understood.