Abstract
A knight wears a maiden’s head around his neck and carries her lifeless body on the horse before him. A Saracen’s severed head is displayed on a pike. An anatomist flays and dismembers a corpse before a gathered crowd. A Roman hero eviscerates himself to avoid capture. These are just a few of the images of violence that circulate in the texts of the early modern period, but as this study claims, they are also instances of the polyvalent practice of combat that plays a significant role in early modern productions of self. Though acts of bodily damage like these seem in some cases gratuitously violent and in other cases heroically beneficial, repositioning these acts as instances of combat situates them within early modern discourses of body and selfhood. Spurred in part by shifting medical practices such as the rise of anatomical science and legal changes such as dueling prohibitions, early modern writers struggle with the tension between two conflicting ideas of combat—a premodern model that sees combat as mutually constitutive of both combatants and a modern model emerging in the sixteenth century that sees combat as an agonistic struggle in which the victor gains agency at the expense of objectifying the vanquished.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).
Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Arthur B. Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry: Studies in the Decline and Transformation of Chivalric Idealism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1960).
Mervyn James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour 1485–1642, (Oxford [Eng.]: Past and Present Society, 1978).
Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
Leah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Phyllis Bartlett, “The heroes of Chapman’s Homer”, Review of English Studies 17.67 (1941), 257–80.
Robin Sowerby, “Chapman’s discovery of Homer”, Translation and Literature 1 (1992), 26–51.
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: Modern Library, 2002).
Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1985).
Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1995).
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
J.R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450–1620 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965).
Robert B. Shoemaker, “The Taming of the Duel: Masculinity, Honour, and Ritual Violence in London, 1660–1800”, The Historical Journal 45.3 (1980): 525–45.
Jennifer Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2003).
Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).
Richard Kaeuper, “Chivalry and the ‘Civilizing process’”, in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard Kaeuper (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000).
Richard Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Robert B. Manning, Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Christian Billings, Masculinity, Corporality, and the English Stage 1580–1635 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008).
Hilary Nunn, Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005).
Vince Lombardi, Jr., What it Takes to Be Number One: Vince Lombardi on Leadership (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 228–9.
Peter Holbrook, Shakespeare’s Individualism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 60.
Neil Rhodes, “Hamlet and Humanism,” in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Comp anion, ed. G.A. Sullivan, P.G. Cheney and A. Hadfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
John Lee, Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and the Controversies of the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 3rd edition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360–1430 (New York: Routledge, 1998).
Lee Patterson “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies”, Speculum 65 (1990).
Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (New York: B. Blackwell, 1986).
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 443.
Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 26.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Simone Weil, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”, in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Sian Miles (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 163.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 145.
David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (New York: Palgrave, 2007).
Katherine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Rachel Ablow, “The Victorian Truth of Torture” (Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Philadelphia, PA, 2008).
Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions on the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Joshua Phillips, English Fictions of Communal Identity 1485–1603 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 54.
Patricia Cahill, Unto the Breach: Martial Formation, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 7–10.
Deborah Willis, “‘The Gnawing Vulture’: Revenge, Trauma Theory, and ‘Titus Andronicus,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.1 (2002), 32.
Thomas Anderson, Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).
Dominic LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Stephen Mennell, and Johan Goudsblom, eds. Norbert Elias on Civilization, Power, and Knowledge: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), esp. 55.
Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
James Robert Allard and Mathew R. Martin, Staging Pain, 1580–1600: Violence and Trauma in British Theater (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009).
Richard Sugg, Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1996).
Copyright information
© 2011 Jennifer Feather
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Feather, J. (2011). Introduction: The Pen and the Sword. In: Writing Combat and the Self in Early Modern English Literature. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010414_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010414_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29860-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-01041-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)