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Down the River
or Practical Lessons Under The Code Duello
George W Hooper
University of Alabama Press, 2007
This delightful divertissement is a lampoon of dueling culture set in southeastern Alabama, penned by a cousin of the better known humorist Johnson Jones Hooper. Interestingly George W. Hooper did not identify himself as the author, perhaps for fear that some enterprising duelist would decide he had been personally lampooned and take umbrage.
 
The main character is a figure familiar in outline to readers of John Gorman Barr, J. J. Hooper, Joseph G. Baldwin, and other practitioners of what is known as the humor of the Old Southwest. This tetchy blowhard is able to find a personal slight in every social circumstance of the most casual nature, to determine the only resolution that could preserve his personal honor is a duel, and then to find elaborate reasons why the affair d’honneur must be postponed indefinitely. The protagonist is accompanied by a Watson-like admirer of comparable wooden-headedness, who admiringly keeps track of all this punctilio—and constantly just barely avoids offending his patron at every turn.
 
The work ends with the provisions of the real “Code Duello,” which cede nothing to the fiction in sheer ridiculousness.
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front cover of Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri
Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri
Dick Steward
University of Missouri Press, 2000

In early-nineteenth-century Missouri, the duel was a rite of passage for many young gentlemen seeking prestige and power. In time, however, other social groups, influenced by the ruling class, engaged in a variety of violent acts and symbolic challenges under the rubric of the code duello. In Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri, Dick Steward takes an in-depth look at the evolution of dueling, tracing the origins, course, consequences, and ultimate demise of one of the most deadly art forms in Missouri history. By focusing on the history of dueling in Missouri, Steward details an important part of our culture and the long-reaching impact this form of violence has had on our society.

Drawing upon accounts of at least a hundred duels—from little-known encounters to those involving celebrated figures such as Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Lucas, Thomas Biddle, Spencer Pettis, and John Smith T—Steward shows how the roots of violence have penetrated our modern culture. He traces the social and cultural changes in the nature of the duel from its earliest form as a defense of honor to its use as a means of revenge. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the formal southern duel had for the most part given way to the improvised western duel, better known as the gunfight. Involving such gunslingers as Wild Bill Hickok and Jesse James, these violent acts captivated people not only in the state but also across the nation. Although the violence entailed different methods of killing, its allure remained as strong as ever.

Steward re-creates the human drama and tragedy in many of these hostile encounters, revealing how different groups operating under the code duello justified family and clan feuds, vigilante justice, and revenge killings. This often-glamorized violence, Steward argues, was viewed as a symbol of honor and courage throughout the century and greatly influenced behavior and attitudes toward violence well into the twentieth century.

While this work centers mainly on Missouri and the history of dueling in the state, its inferences extend well past the region itself. Well-written and thoroughly researched, Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri provides valuable insight into the violent social climate of yesterday.

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front cover of MEN AND VIOLENCE
MEN AND VIOLENCE
GENDER, HONOR, AND RITUALS IN MODERN EUROPE AND AMERICA
PIETER SPIERENBURG
The Ohio State University Press, 1998
There is growing interest in the history of masculinity and male culture, including violence, as an integral part of a proper understanding of gender. In almost every historical setting, masculinity and violence are closely linked; certainly, violent crime has been overwhelmingly a male enterprise. But violence is not always criminal: in many cultural contexts violence is linked instead to honor and encoded in rituals. We possess only an imperfect understanding of the ways in which aggressive behavior, or the abstention from aggressive behavior, contributes to the construction of masculinity and male honor. In this collection, internationally renowned expert Pieter Spierenburg brings together eight scholars to explore the fascinating interrelationship of masculinity, honor, and the body.
            The essays focus on the United States and western Europe from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The contributors are Ute Frevert, Steven Hughes, Robert Nye, Daniele Boschi, Amy Sophia Greenberg, Martin J. Wiener, Stephen Kantrowitz, and Terence Finnegan. Men and Violence will be welcomed and widely used by a broad range of scholars and students.
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front cover of Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay
Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay
Craig Turner and Tony Soper. Foreword by Joseph Papp
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

Featuring period drawings and prints of swordplay, this book examines and compares three Elizabethan fencing manuals written in English before 1600: Giacomo Di Grassi’s His True Arte of Defense (1594), Vincentio Saviolo’s His Practice in Two Bookes (1595), and George Silver’s Paradoxes of Defence and Bref Instructions upon My Paradoxes of Defence (1599).

More than a technical manual on swordplay, this book explores the influence of a new form of violence introduced into Elizabethan culture by the invention of the rapier. The authors examine the rapier’s influence on the various social classes, the clash between the traditional English fencing masters and those embracing the new style, the growing concern with unregulated dueling, and the frequent references to rapier play in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

As producer Joseph Papp notes in his foreword, this is a book that "makes a difference in performance."

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front cover of Politics of the Sword
Politics of the Sword
Dueling, Honor, and Masculinity in Modern Italy
Steven C. Hughes
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
            Following its creation as a country in 1861, Italy experienced a wave of dueling that led commentators to bemoan a national “duellomania” evidenced by the sad spectacle of a duel a day. Pamphlets with titles like “Down with the Duel” and “The Shame of the Duel” all communicated the passion of those who could not believe that a people supposedly just returned to the path of progress and civilization had wholeheartedly embraced such a “barbaric” custom. Yet these critics were consistently countered by sober-minded men of rank and influence who felt that the duel was necessary for the very health of the new nation.
            Steven C. Hughes argues that this extraordinary increase in chivalric combat occurred because the duel played an important role in the formation, consolidation, and functioning of united Italy. The code of honor that lay at the heart of the dueling ethic offered a common model and bond of masculine identity for those patriotic elites who, having created a country of great variety and contrast for often contradictory motives, had to then deal with the consequences. Thus dueling became an iconic weapon of struggle during the Risorgimento, and, as Italy performed poorly on the stage of great power politics, it continued to offer images of martial valor and manly discipline. It also enhanced the social and political power of the new national elites, whose monopoly over chivalric honor helped reinforce the disenfranchisement of the masses. Eventually, the duel fed into the hypermasculinity and cult of violence that marked the early fascist movement, but in the end it would prove too individualistic in its definition of honor to stand up to the emerging totalitarian state. Although Mussolini would himself fight five duels at the start of his career, the duel would disappear along with the liberal regime that had embraced it.
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front cover of Touché
Touché
The Duel in Literature
John Leigh
Harvard University Press, 2015

The monarchs of seventeenth-century Europe put a surprisingly high priority on the abolition of dueling, seeing its eradication as an important step from barbarism toward a rational state monopoly on justice. But it was one thing to ban dueling and another to stop it. Duelists continued to kill each other with swords or pistols in significant numbers deep into the nineteenth century. In 1883 Maupassant called dueling “the last of our unreasonable customs.” As a dramatic and forbidden ritual from another age, the duel retained a powerful hold on the public mind and, in particular, the literary imagination.

Many of the greatest names in Western literature wrote about or even fought in duels, among them Corneille, Molière, Richardson, Rousseau, Pushkin, Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Twain, Conrad, Chekhov, and Mann. As John Leigh explains, the duel was a gift as a plot device. But writers also sought to discover in duels something more fundamental about human conflict and how we face our fears of humiliation, pain, and death. The duel was, for some, a social cause, a scourge to be mocked or lamented; yet even its critics could be seduced by its risk and glamour. Some conservatives defended dueling by arguing that the man of noble bearing who cared less about living than living with honor was everything that the contemporary bourgeois was not. The literary history of the duel, as Touché makes clear, illuminates the tensions that attended the birth of the modern world.

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