Claim. A chivalric ethic that measures the worth of any deed by what it costs you can convert wounds into identity — a redemptive-suffering logic that rhymes with indemnity yet can curdle into glorifying the wound itself.
Elaboration. Geoffroi de Charny’s Book of Chivalry rests, the essay says, on “a single idea, which is that the worth of any deed is measured by how much it costs you to accomplish it” — jousting is good, war is best “because it actually destroys you. The suffering is what makes it worth anything.” The wounds of war thus become “something that you have to earn and then endure, but then you convert them into your identity”: “you’re not allowed to not be damaged because being damaged is proof that you were there.” This rhymes with indemnity — suffering that pays a price and restores — and the essay even reaches for the monastic parallel of fasting and hair shirts. But it also marks the danger: a theology of cost can slide from suffering has redemptive meaning into suffering is the proof and the point, prizing the scar over the healing it was meant to serve.
See also. loss-of-role-as-living-death · indemnity