Definition
The chivalric test is an act of devotion or sacrifice — drawn from the courtly-love tradition Greene cites — that is meant to prove the seriousness of a person's commitment. The pursuer performs some difficult or costly gesture, and the gesture itself becomes the evidence of love.
Greene treats this as a way to deepen attachment: a sacrifice made for someone raises that person's perceived value and signals that the relationship is more than convenient. The cost is the message.
Why it matters
How it works
The chivalric test exploits a quirk of self-perception: people infer their own feelings partly from their own actions. Having sacrificed for someone, a person reasons backward — "I would not have done that unless I cared deeply" — and the attachment strengthens. Symbolically, the difficulty of the gesture also flatters the recipient, who reads the effort as a measure of their worth. The defensive reading matters here: a single meaningful gesture is healthy reciprocity, but a relationship structured around continuous tests of loyalty, each harder than the last, is using the mechanism to extract compliance.