A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, Y cladd in mightie armes and ſiluer ſhielde, Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine, The cruell markes of many’ a bloudy fielde; Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield

— Spenser, The Faerie Queene I.i (1596)

“Gentle” is doing the sanitizing work in plain sight. The word arrives trailing gentil — birth, breeding, the whole chivalric apparatus of refinement — and the stanza immediately punctures it: the shield carries the cruell markes of bloudy fields, and the knight has never actually fought. The lexicon of courtesy precedes the violence it claims to have transformed. Spenser knows this. He doesn’t resolve it; he places the contradiction in the opening lines and lets it run for twelve books.