Abstract
The debate about the persistence of chivalric values in the European Renaissance has produced contrasting theories. Generally speaking, the alternatives underlying all constructions are whether the traces which the romantic medieval world bequeathed to the more realistic Renaissance culture are to be considered as signs of continuity and permanence or of discontinuity and complete change.
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Notes
Johann Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), 99–100.
Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), I, 397, 401.
Mario Domenichelli, Cavaliere e gentiluomo (Roma: Bulzoni, 2002), 36, 51–2.
Sidney Anglo, ‘Introduction’, in Chivalry in the Renaissance, ed. by Sydney Anglo (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1990), xi–xvi (xiii).
Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The Courtyer, Thomas Hoby’s first English version of Il cortegiano, was published in 1561; George Pettie’s The ciuile conuersation, his translation from the French of the first three books of Guazzo’s text, appeared in 1581, and was followed five years later by the fourth and final book translated by Bartholomew Young (who worked directly from the Italian original).
Mervyn James, Society Politics and Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 308, 309, 322.
Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of Aristocracy1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 243.
Robert Baldick, The Duel (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965).
All Shakespeare quotations are from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
Christine de Pisan, The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry, trans. by Sumner Willard (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999), 197, 198.
The legal aspects of the trial by battle in Shakespeare are discussed by George W. Keeton who, in Shakespeare’s Legal and Political Background (London: Pitman, 1967), examines this episode (214–16). On single combat in Shakespeare,
see Theodor Meron, Bloody Constraint: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 86–93; on the rites of chivalry,
see James T. Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 131–50. J.R. Hale argues that the duel as ritualized form of violence implied that ‘there was an ideal, a really true law that existed for the man who saw himself as exceptional […] that would permit him to give rein to his aggressiveness but at the same time protect him from its full consequences by a ritualization of the preliminaries to and the actual forms of combat’. See ‘Sixteenth-Century Explanations of War and Violence’, in John R. Hale, Renaissance War Studies (London: Humbledon Press, 1983), 335–58 (344).
Joannes de Legnano, Tractatus de hello, de represaliis et de duello, trans. by James L. Brierly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917), 331–2.
G.W.F. Hegel, Esthetics, trans. by T.M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), I, 558.
George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 5.
Jennifer Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 9.
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© 2013 Paola Pugliatti
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Pugliatti, P. (2013). Killing by the Book: Scenes from the Duel Ritual. In: Dente, C., Soncini, S. (eds) Shakespeare and Conflict. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311344_4
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