This one seems very nicely done so far, and well researched. The author also wrote the foreword for the Geffroi de Charney's Book of Knighthood copy that I have, and it contained a lot of interesting insights into the time in which he lived and the context in which he wrote it. It's definitely more scholarly, and in fact starts out deriding other "scholarly" works that look only at one aspect or another, whether it's doing as you mentioned, or going the other way and viewing it only through the rose tinted lenses of the romantic ideal. Instead, the author says that one must look at all of the aspects in order to get a sense of the reality of the period. One must look at how chivalry influenced the violence, and vice versa, and how people managed to uphold the ideals and how they failed, and what those ideals actually might have been.
The first chapter sets the stage pretty well for the state of Europe in the early 12th century, before the notion of chivalry started to really take hold into the forms we're more familiar with.
