Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War

Abstract

Ambitious and readable, Bloody Good revisits some familiar questions on First World War conceptions of sacrifice in a novel and illuminating way. Allen Frantzen uses an extraordinary range of sources including poetry, paintings, music, posters, film, and sculpture to analyse the history of an idea over the span of more than a millennium. Frantzen develops two key concepts: sacrifice, the taking of life in order to avenge another's death, which promoted a cycle of violence; and anti-sacrifice, where forgiveness and mercy led to a pacifistic refusal to fight. Both these positions have historically found expression in Christian thought, and he illustrates the theological basis of each to show how Christ's Passion and Christ's wounded body became an inspiration for fighting men, a model of suffering and purposeful death. Through a detailed and far-ranging survey of chivalric manuals and other medieval commentaries on chivalry and knighthood, Frantzen traces the development of these concepts from Anglo-Saxon Britain to the French high middle ages. He then shows how chivalry was reworked in Victorian Britain to provide the basis for a conception of heroic masculinity and Christian duty which could operate on a mass scale. It was with these ideas, he argues, that educated British men went to war in 1914.