Discourse in Steel Aspects of Interpersonal Violence, Anxiety, and the Negotiation of Masculine Identity in Western European Literature, 1100–1600 Michael Ovens B.A. (Hons) Medieval and Early Modern Studies This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Medieval and Early Modern Studies of The University of Western Australia School of Humanities 2016 Summary This dissertation seeks to update scholarly understandings of literary representations of interpersonal violence during the Middle Ages and Renaissance in order to bring them into line with the latest historical and sociological understandings of the relationship between violence and culture. Among modern scholars of medieval literature there remains a tendency to interpret violence in a limited sense as the intentional or threatened use of physical force to cause death or injury. Although this conception of violence allows scholars to work with a precise definition which is amenable to analysis, by restricting acts of violence to the intentional and the direct this framework fails to recognise the fact that medieval societies understood violence to extend beyond the realm of the physical. Through a series of literary case studies from France, England, Germany, and Italy across the period 1100–1600, I argue that representations of violence and single combat participated in larger debates over the relative value of competing ideals of masculinity, debates which were themselves underpinned by a conception of violence that encompassed not only physical force but also the social and ethical realms of human conflict. I argue that these debates were responsible for shaping the genesis and development of the codified Western martial arts traditions from as early as the thirteenth century and suggest ways in which literary representations of violence offer the modern world alternative taxonomies of violence which are conducive to human flourishing. Acknowledgments I would like to thank both The University of Western Australia and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions for supporting me over the last few years. I could not have wished for a more welcoming or stimulating environment. I would also like to thank the many training partners who have joined with me in exploring the practical application and reconstruction of the historical European martial arts; their thoughts, labours, and companionship formed the seed of the present work. Particular thanks are due to Luke and Patrick, who have been with me from the start and whose unflagging enthusiasm has helped keep my own passion alive. I owe profound debts to my three supervisors. Bob White played the role of the wise sage to perfection, lighting a multitude of intellectual paths with judicious interjections. Danijela Kambaskovic offered both stylistic advice and emotional support in my hour of need; I owe her an unpayable debt. Andrew Lynch has been outstanding through and through, sharp in his critique and gentle in his encouragement; I am honoured to call him a mentor. My family — Wayne, Sharon, and Dani — have been for me through thick and thin. We have had our disagreements and I can be something of an absent figure within the household, but their love and support has been unfailing. I am blessed to have both parents who support me in my strangest endeavours and a sister who loves me despite my absence. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Imogen; her love, companionship, and scholarly rigour have enriched both life and labour beyond what words can tell. Table of Contents 1 Introduction 13 2 Violence and Christian Identity in Late Antique and Medieval Europe 30 3 Prowess and the Distinction of Knights from Rustics to Chrétien de Troyes 67 4 Faith as Distinction in Arthur’s Battles with the Giant of Mont St-Michel 107 5 Peace, Violence, and Masculinity in Kudrun 140 6 Rationality and Violence in the Three Crowns of Renaissance Ferrara 178 7 Reframing Medieval Violence in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV 221 8 Conclusion 264 9 Bibliography 270 ‘The prize of all history is the understanding of modern times.’ —Frank K. Crowley A Note on Translations All translations are based on published academic editions, cited where appropriate, which I have modified where paraphrase or idiom rendered them ill-fit for purpose. 1 Introduction On the 25th of November 1936, J. R. R. Tolkien delivered a lecture to the British Academy in which he addressed the critical belief, popular at the time, that the Old English poem known as Beowulf exhibited a ‘radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevances [i.e. Beowulf’s battles with the monsters] in the centre and the serious things [i.e. the poem’s historic allusions] on the outer edges’.1 ‘The fault of Beowulf,’ according to W. P. Ker, is that there is nothing much in the story. The hero is occupied in killing monsters, like Hercules or Theseus. But there are other things in the lives of Hercules and Theseus besides the killing of the Hydra or of Procrustes. Beowulf has nothing else to do; he goes home to his own Gautland, until at last the rolling years bring the Fire-drake and his last adventure.2 The single combats of medieval and early modern literature occupy much the same position today that the monsters of Beowulf occupied in the early 1930s. Where critics once saw in Beowulf a certain ‘dignity of style’ which persisted despite its deficit of plot, today they perceive in the single combats of medieval and early modern literature certain ‘issues of character, structural patterning, and thematic development […] rather than their direct narrative content’.3 Such critics tend to either brush off the blows, 1 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, in Beowulf: A Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney, ed. Daniel Donoghue (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 103–130. 2 W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 252–53. 3 Andrew Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 38. 13 parries, and wounds of these mortal struggles as a form of literary spectacle – ancient equivalents of those Hollywood special effects which are ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ – or read them as signifying a psychosexual fascination on the part of the author in such a way that every weapon becomes a phallus and every wound a yonic emasculation. The situation is scarcely better in the neighbouring discipline of history where ‘both the significance of [the martial] arts, and the fact that they have been largely ignored by historians, are easily established’.4 This is true even of those historians of violence and chivalry who argue that ‘we will radically misunderstand the medieval view and the medieval reality if we push the bloody, sweaty, muscular work done with lance and sword swiftly and antiseptically to the side and hasten on to speak of more abstract, more appealing qualities’.5 Though admirable in their goal to move beyond ‘naïve and simplistic views about what the ideals of knighthood actually were in the middle ages’,6 the ‘realities’ which they recover appear to owe as much to twentieth-centuries understandings of war as mud, blood, and slaughter as they do to medieval conceptions of interpersonal and intergroup conflict. This dissertation demonstrates that representations of medieval and early modern single combat participated in societal debates over the relative value of competing ideals of masculinity, debates which were themselves underpinned by a conception of violence that encompassed not only physical force but also the social and ethical realms of human conflict. Through a series of case studies from France, 4 Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 2. 5 Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 139. 6 Craig Taylor, Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France during the Hundred Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), xii. 14 England, Germany, and Italy across the period 1100-1600, I argue that these debates were responsible for shaping the genesis and development of the codified Western martial arts traditions from as early as the thirteenth century and suggest ways in which literary representations of single combat offer the modern world alternative taxonomies of violence which are conducive to human flourishing. WHIG HISTORIES OF SINGLE COMBAT The modern misperception that medieval and early modern combat was a brutal, senseless affair has its origins in what is known as ‘whig history’, the tendency to ‘emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present’.7 This mode of history remains with us today but was particularly pronounced in the late nineteenth century when Victorian England turned away from romantic primitivism and embraced a kind of neo-Hobbesian worldview in which ‘the state of men without civil society (which state we may properly call the state of nature) is nothing else but a mere war of all against all’ (conditionem hominum extra societatem civilem, quam conditionem appellare liceat statum naturæ, aliam non esse quam bellum omnium contra omnes).8 Capturing the mid-century zeitgeist, Charles Dickens called natural man a ‘savage […] a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth’. The faults of man 7 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: W. W. Norton, 1965), v. 8 Thomas Hobbes, Opera Philosophica, 2 vols., ed. William Molesworth (London, 1839), II.148; trans. Bernard Gert, Man and Citizen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 101. 15 in the state of nature, according to Dickens, were many, but one which stands out is their predilection for violence: The noble savage sets a king to reign over him, to whom he submits his life and limbs without a murmur or question, and whose whole life is passed chin deep in a lake of blood; but who, after killing incessantly, is in his turn killed by his relations and friends, the moment a grey hair appears on his head.