Sir Gawin And The Green Knight And The Order Of The Garter by Francis Ingledew (Associate Professor, School of English, Philosophy, and Humanities, Fairleigh Dickinson University) is a scholarly assessment of the Arthurian poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and its relationship to the medieval chivalric ideology that became ritualized in the "Order of the Garter" and other European
knightly orders of the period.
The commencement of the crusades and the formulation of knightly orders might have been responsible for the tremendous popularity of these chivalrous Romances.
The late medieval period saw the end of the crusades, the decline of the knightly order and the courtly Romance and the rise of Burgerliche Kultur.
The task cannot be an easy one, not least because of what he properly calls the "thicket of nationalist historiography" that springs up everywhere in this part of the world: Lithuania's "ascension" will be described very differently by its own scholars, in contrast to Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian scholarship, not to mention historians operating with a bias toward these "romantic" pagans, or scholars with a contrary bias against these barbaric opponents to the German knightly Orders and their medieval Drang nach Osten.
To the Papacy Gediminas offered, perhaps and maybe, the possibility of his and his realm's baptism and consequent conversion -- if he could get a better diplomatic deal or more leverage vis-a-vis the ever-troublesome Knightly Orders. As it turned out, he couldn't, and so the Grand Duke lived and died a comparatively tolerant pagan, using Roman monks to write his letters, and Orthodox ecclesiastics to help secure the loyal allegiance of his clients, the Russo-Slavs to the east.