Book Review

Comparative/World

In Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516), when Ruggiero is liberated from the enchantress Alcina, who has literally imprisoned him with pleasure, he is reproved for succumbing to such "effeminate" enchantments. Tellingly that reproach turns on manliness: Ruggiero should have eschewed "effeminate" pleasures, because as a man his was violently to win honor and glory. Honor, violence, manliness are intertwined here in a gendered behavioral code that realized great men and status; this collection of essays edited by Pieter Spierenburg explores how this Renaissance trope became modern.	1
Certainly manliness and violence have long been associated, but as the history of gender expands to include men more systematically that association warrants closer consideration, and here it gets a closer cultural consideration. Biological imperatives and sociobiologists are tellingly absent; rather the focus is on culture and the cultural-evolutionary vision of Norbert Elias. But there is another eminence grise that looms behind Elias: Michel Foucault. In many ways his view of sexuality, discipline, and the modern informs these studies for better and occasionally worse.	2
These nine essays, as interesting and suggestive as they are, clearly cannot cover the subject; rather they consider three related areas of male violence: elite dueling, popular dueling, and the state's disciplining of violence. The triad of essays on elite dueling form perhaps the most successful section, in part because the pathbreaking earlier books published by Ute Frevert and especially Robert Nye provide an excellent point of departure and in part because they offer such a rich range of perspectives. Frevert, following Elias, stresses a cultural/class vision of the duel in Germany and Prussia that sees progressive bourgeois involvement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as leading to its becoming less violent, more ritualized and "civilized." Steven Hughes suggestively takes a more political turn to see the duel in Italy as intimately associated with the Risorgimento and the establishment of liberal and republican forms of government. And Robert Nye, in a way, pulls these themes together, melding the political (of "modern" state formation) with the social (of the incorporation of the bourgeoisie) with gender to show with complexity and nuance how the duel was rekindled at the end of the nineteenth century in France and died at the hands of the democratic violence of World War I. What is particularly impressive about this section is that in a brief seventy pages one is given a rich appreciation of the complex cultural variations that can be built on the ritualized violence of dueling—each society discussed follows its own trajectory and its own traditions and culture to arrive at a more subtle vision of Elias's "civilizing process" and Foucault's modern disciplined man.	. . .