To continue from this post. If the duel doesn't have a direct ancestor in the medieval joust, then where does it come from? It, along with the rapier, arrived in England from Spain and Italy in the mid-sixteenth century, but why did it become such an object of interest and fashion? I think that it might be ascribed to interest in Humanism and classicism and the resulting fashion for all things with a classical or baroque influence.
Joseph M. Levine's study of classical influences in Restoration society, Between the Ancients and the Moderns, is particularly illuminating on this front, as well as being an extremely readable book in its own right. This period, during which sword-fighting on stage experienced an increased popularity, saw classical motifs and inspiration elsewhere in society: in architecture, in education, in overseas travel, and in the place of the man in society. As Levine demonstrates, seventeenth-century culture is indebted to antiquity for fashions in all of these. However, it is the final one that especially interests me. Levine's argument places the charitable acts of fashionable, well-to-do men of the seventeenth century acted not (solely) as examples of Christian aid but rather as emulations of the wealthy classical gentleman. He writes:
The fact is that the best, perhaps the only, moral justification for the life and privileges of a gentleman lay then, as in ancient Athens and Rome, in direct participation in public life - in a life of service to the community. (Levine, 9)
This is not a trivial claim. To contend that the seventeenth-century gentleman should perform good works in the community in imitation of classical examples, rather than those found in the Bible, is to suggest that sections of the society thought of antiquity before Christianity. I don't think that this was the dominating attitude. As well as the religious Dissenters, the first ten years of the Restoration saw the Corporation Act (1661), the Act of Religious Uniformity (1662), the Conventicle Act (1664), and the Five Mile Act (1665), as well as the publications of the Book of Common Prayer (1664) and Paradise Lost (1667). Although there was great contemporary interest in classicism, religion remained a prevailing concern in England.
I would therefore make a slight amendment to Levine's focus: that a moral justification of the life and privileges of a gentleman could be found in ancient Athens and Rome, and the Bible. For those who wanted to rationalise societal emulations of the classical world, it was not hard to connect it with the Bible. For example, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote:
If people who live agreeably are Epicureans, none are more truly Epicurean than the righteous and godly. And if it is names that bother us, no one better deserves the name of Epicurean than the revered founder and head of the Christian philosophy Christ, for in Greek epikouros means "helper". He alone, when the law of Nature was all but blotted out by sins, when the law of Moses incited to lists rather than cured them, when Satan ruled in the world unchallenged, brought timely aid to perishing humanity. (Erasmus 549)
Thus, if to follow the classical mode of living was to apply benevolence to public life, this was in exact accordance with the example given by Christ. We can then imagine how the Restoration modern man aware of and influenced by classical ideology may well have chosen to interpret Christian scripture according to classical fashion. Just as the Dissenters sought divine justification for violence in the Old Testament, so did the classicists confirm their refinements in Greek and Roman texts. Both groups were Christian (although the Dissenters were the more fanatical of the two); both saw their lifestyles as compatible with the teachings of the New Testament.
The younger generation of classicists were of the same ilk. Just as their fathers rejoiced in architecture and education inspired by classical antiquity and encouraged travels through Greece and Italy, so too did the sons enjoy the fashion of duelling in both dramatic works and reality. This is to be explored in a later entry.
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