This topic has always fascinated me to the point that I was hoping to write some historical fiction, even if just for my own amusement. However, the teacher in me wants my depictions of this time period and the people in it to be as accurate as possible; the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Edit: Gah! Noticed you said 'the teacher in me' rather than some variation of 'my teacher wants me'. Excuse my poor comprehension, I fell off a rather high horse recently. I would still recommend refining a period unless you plan to dedicate a few hours a day for the rest of your life to this.
You need to define a period for your studies (I imagine fiction will follow the facts you learn). Knighthood in the medieval period covers five or six hundred years of history and varied immensely from region to region. Landless knights on the Iberian peninsula, unfree knights in the Holy Roman Empire are stand out examples, alongside the holy military orders of the frontiers.
The most commonly conceived of knight (the chivalrous warrior) emerged well after knighthood, and when knighthood's social ubiquity waned chivalry's cultural audience waxed. Thus a study of knighthood after c.1300 is a study of the nobility; the study of the preceding period is the study of the aristocracy. These are, semantically, distinct terms although they are used interchangeably by laymen and lazy historians.
There is little chance (to be bluntly honest absolutely none) you will be able to reflect this chronological and geographical scope 'accurately' (although I understand you mean warts-and-all). Not even a top scholar (or ten working in cahoots) in the field could do so without a multi-volume series.
I recommend before any other book the recent work by Craig Taylor (Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France During the Hundred Years War, Cambridge, 2013) for which the preface and the introduction are both available online. This book is a challenge to several historical narratives which have dominated twentieth-century historiography and, despite being devoted to the fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries, is a wonderful, lucid, and innovative examination of knighthood and chivalry at its intellectual peak - warts-(illusory or not)-and-all.
The period c.1150-1450 (with notable lacunae) in England and France is within my comfort zone and, although I'm more focused on culture and politics than military history, I'd be more than happy to recommend a reading list appropriate to your level of study and period (I am capable of recommending Anglophone secondary material in other regions in the same chronological period). If you want to study the origins of knighthood /u/RitterMeister is knowledgeable, and for arms, armour, and warfare (esp. Later Middle Ages) /u/Valkine.