Bloody good: chivalry, sacrifice, and the Great War

Abstract

Frantzen, Alien. Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 26 color plates, 350pp. $35.00 hardcover. Chivalry died in the trenches of World War I. The advent of mass warfare and the technologies of industrial killing (Omer Bartov) obliterated traditional notions of military chivalry. This is the conventional wisdom Alien Frantzen's imaginative and lavishly illustrated Bloody Good sets out to question. Despite the modern reality of Great War battles, Frantzen notes, chivalric imagery was common place. Swords, knights and dragon slayers could be found on war posters, post cards, and war memorials in Britain and France as well as Germany. Chivalry did not die with World War I, the author suggests, instead it continued to reinforce group identity and notions of heroic masculinity, making it essential to understanding violence in the modern world. In its attempt to comprehend the meaning of chivalric images during the Great War, Bloody Good pursues an unusual path. The entire first half of Frantzen's study is devoted to the rise of the concept of chivalry during the Middle Ages. The relationship of chivalry and sacrifice is central to Frantzen's reading of the (often contradictory) religious dimension of chivalry. Mirroring Christ's double identity as victim and avenger, the chivalrous knight found himself torn between the anti-sacrificial restraints of mercy and forgiveness and sacrificial notions of revenge. Heroic self-sacrifice gave meaning to a warrior's death by allowing him to resemble Christ. In World War I propaganda (as in medieval poetry), the image of Christ often became linked with that of the knight, promising the martyr salvation through his fight with the other. Over several chapters, Frantzen traces the making of the medieval concept of knighthood. He focuses on the development of chivalric themes in literature that increasingly intertwined prowess and piety. Medieval manuals of chivalry conceived of ladders of sacrifice as a scale of knightly achievement. The costs of chivalry and the grief and violence it could inflict, however, did not receive attention comparable to that of the knight as heroic self-sacrificer. For the second half of his study, Frantzen shifts his attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He considers the revival of chivalric imagery and notions of duty in Victorian Britain. Self-discipline rather than physical prowess was central to most nineteenth-century interpretations of chivalry. …