The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (review)

Despite its title (and its inclusion in a series called "Ideas in Context"), The Duel in Early Modern England says almost nothing about real duels or their perpetrators. Readers will not learn how many duels took place, who participated in them, how duelists felt about the experience, or how closely they adhered to the rules that theorists laid out. Instead, the book is a careful, scholarly, insightful study of English ideas about dueling and their relationship to other ideas; "context" in this case is "intellectual context," exemplifying an approach to history notably advocated by Skinner.¹ Peltonen is especially interested in connections between ideas about dueling and early modern theories of civility and social interaction. That relationship, he argues, was far closer than historians have usually recognized; appreciating the connection should change the conception of how dueling fit within Europe's cultural development. Dueling was no primitive survival from the Middle Ages, but a by- product of Renaissance ideas about selfhood and sociability. Thoughtful intellectuals continued to defend dueling well into the nineteenth century. Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch physician and writer who moved to London, even saw it as contributing to the development of an advanced commercial society.

Renaissance theorists like Baldesar Castiglione, Peltonen argues, developed a theatrical idea of how selfhood functioned. Life in society, most vividly exemplified at the courts of princes, required a continuing effort to please others and gain their respect. This effort required that individuals disguise personal feelings and conform to others' views, even at the risk of hypocrisy or flattery. But this attentiveness to others' opinions implied extreme sensitivity concerning one's own. Given the importance of others' esteem in determining the value of individuals, rudeness or mere disregard from others threatened one's own standing. Dueling was a means of reasserting one's existence in the face of such threats. Conversely, the knowledge that hasty words might lead to violence encouraged politeness, a point that advocates reiterated throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dueling, they believed, had other benefits as well: It readied men for warfare, and it helped preserve the sturdy, independent-minded national character on which Britons increasingly prided themselves.

Critics of dueling also abounded, but (Peltonen shows) they faced difficult choices in attempting to rebut their opponents' logics. Some, like the Earl of Northampton early in the seventeenth century, accepted the theatrical view of civility, and sought only to find new ways of compensating individuals who had suffered insults. In contrast, Francis Bacon, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and others argued against the theatrical model of social interaction itself. Real social life, they argued, could not consist only in the exchange of polite hypocrisies. Instead, they offered authenticity as a measure of social worth, arguing that a sensible man would show indifference to the minor slights and arguments that real conversation might entail.

Peltonen explicates these lines of argument with impressive erudition. Occasionally he is more attentive to the logic in his texts than to their ambiguities and hesitations, but his book is likely to remain the definitive account of British debates about an important social practice. But his careful focus on these debates comes at a price. Even an intellectual history of dueling would benefit from examination of contemporary theories of the rage and hatred that were said to characterize men in a fight. Arguments about dueling's connection with "the civilizing process" and the absolutist state would likewise benefit from some attention to practical realities. Stone (from whom Peltonen takes his book's only numerical estimates of dueling's frequency) suggested that duelists often paid little attention to formalities, and that dueling evolved naturally from medieval gang warfare; Anglo has also brilliantly evoked the brutal desperation of early modern fighting and its close resemblance to medieval practice.² Such studies point to the gaps between theory and practice...