The damsel in distress is a narrative device in which one or more men must rescue a woman who has been kidnapped or placed in other peril. Kinship, love, lust or a combination of those motivate the male protagonist to initiate the narrative.
Frank Bernard Dicksee's 1885 painting Chivalry
Rembrandt's Andromeda chained to the rock – a late-Renaissance damsel in distress from Greek mythology.
Paolo Uccello's depiction of Saint George and the dragon, c. 1470, a classic image of a damsel in distress.
John Everett Millais' The Knight Errant of 1870 saves a damsel in distress and underlines the erotic subtext of the genre.
A knight-errant is a figure of medieval chivalric romance literature. The adjective errant indicates how the knight-errant would wander the land in search of adventures to prove his chivalric virtues, either in knightly duels or in some other pursuit of courtly love.
Title page of an Amadís de Gaula romance of 1533
"Yvain rescues the lion", from Garrett MS 125, an illustrated manuscript of Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion, dated to ca. 1295.