Mary Friedman Blum's 2004 (UNM) dissertation, The Comitatus in the Trenches: Reading the Poetry of World War I through the Lens of Anglo-Saxon Heroism examined the social relationship of the smaller fighting units in the trenches of World War I. Now in his fascinating and ambitious nine-chapter study, Allen J. Frantzen explores "the medieval subtexts of chivalry and sacrifice on which the Great War rested" (1), both a study of individual soldier behavior and state presented ethos of war. All combatants, Frantzen argues, "believed that they were fighting a holy war and used Christ's Passion and death to ennoble their efforts" (2). This belief ties the soldiers of World War I to medieval knights of chivalry, who had two "conflicting responses to Christ's death"(3): in a "sacrificial" response, the knight avenges Christ's death; in an "antisacrificial" response, the knight--in greater imitation of Christ--would not take revenge against Christ's persecutors and thus stop "cyclical violence"(3). The author proposes a third chivalric response for fighting men, the self-sacrificial one "that conflate[s] prowess and piety and blur[s] the lines between sacrifice and antisacrifice"(3)--what Frantzen calls the "bloody good"(6). In this two-part book, the first five chapters examine medieval "heroic men and their relationship to sacrificial culture"(7), and the last four analyze nineteenth- and twentieth-century responses to medieval chivalry.
Chapter One, "Chivalry and Sacrifice," asserts that the "bloody good of medieval chivalry, chivalry's relation to cycles of revenge on one hand and acts of mercy on the other"(22) has so far been misinterpreted. This is evident in the uneasy relationship of the church to knighthood. By risking their bodies in combat, knights became "'the privileged practitioners of violence in their society'" (23). Since the church ultimately sanctioned violence, and the knights resorted to church language to valorize their business, "piety and violence converge[d]" (24), and because of the Crusades, the Passion modeled the knight's piety as well as his reason for warring.
"Violence and Abjection," Chapter Two, traces the transformation of both the Germanic warrior to chivalric knight and lover, and of Christ the "victorious warrior" to Christ the knight, tying this development to the "militant spirit of Christianity" (33) evident, for instance, in the Rule of St. Benedict. At this point, Frantzen introduces the anthropological theories of Rene Girard, whose definition of sacrifice is "limited violence" (39) that achieves social order. In chivalry, competitive and violent behavior can be explored with "'triangular desire'" (40) that involves the knight, Christ as the mediator of the desire, and the object of desire to be like Christ and suffer his exemplary death. The chapter concludes with a comparison of Cain and Abel and Christ's Passion as representative of the sacrificial and antisacrificial responses. Two other works, both by disciples of Girard, would complement Frantzen's extensive bibliography: James Alison's Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (Crossroad, 1996) and Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (Crossroad, 1997).
Chapter Three, "The Making of a Knight: St. Edmund, Virgin and Martyr" chronicles the transformation of St. Edmund from a "wholly antisacrificial figure" (53) to a great warrior at the hands of his hagiographers over five hundred years. As a result, the figure of Edmund functions "both as a fighter and as a martyr, the new paradigm of the heroic male" (72), as evidenced by the manuals of chivalry. Chapter Four, "Chivalry and Sacrifice: A Chronicle of Scales," discusses. All extant chivalric manuals had been written after the Third Crusade (1187) and provide "a scale of heroic masculinity" (77): "The closer to Christ one comes, the closer one is to death. The manuals not only rationalize the risk of knightly violence but also teach the knight to see his sacrificial acts as self-sacrifice and to claim the status of martyr. In this way the manuals explain and institutionalize the sacrificial reflex" (77). The fifth medieval chapter, "Antisacrifice: The Hidden Cost of Chivalry," elaborates on the chivalric writings of the fifteenth-century authors Honore Bouvet, Phillipe de Mezieres, Christine de Pisan, Andrew Wyntoun, Sir Thomas Gray, and William Caxton because "they pay attention to the lowest as well as the highest reaches of the scale of heroic masculinity, and thereby elaborate the meaning of sacrifice for all those who lived and died for chivalry" (99). One example that stood out was Andrew of Wyntoun's reporting of the sacrificial response of Scottish noble Alexander de Seton's wife. The couple lost two sons to the English in a short time; Wyntoun reports a defiant and non-grieving attitude by Lady Seton. Frantzen ties this to the sacrificial story of Abraham and Isaac and implies parents readily sacrifice their children to war. Nowhere does Frantzen entertain the notion that the report may be apocryphal or propaganda in the first place.
Because of the medieval revival in the nineteenth century, that century becomes the bridge to World War I, and so does Chapter Six, "'Modest stillness and humility': The Nineteenth Century and the Chivalry of Duty." Not all ideas about chivalry were identical, however, and Frantzen delineates both scholarly and popular receptions, including conduct books and reenactments of medieval pageants, showing "how Victorians sought to recover and recreate the culture of chivalry" (129). The antisacrificial aspect of chivalry was evident in romances and paintings emphasizing "gentleness, mercy, devotion to Christ" (130), which brought into tension heroic and tender masculinity.
The most interesting part of the book, Chapter Seven, "'Teach them how to war': Postcards, Chivalry, and Sacrifice," contains the bulk of the pictorial evidence, as Frantzen analyzes the martial values of largely English and German posters and postcards. According to Frantzen, chivalric and knightly images were utilized on posters for enlistment, morale, Feindbild, and consumer information. Chivalric representations on postcards--the ubiquitous medium of World War I--are discussed in three major categories, mostly depicting sacrificial, self-sacrificial and seldom antisacrificial behavior: first, the evocation of "images of knights in armor creating mythical or historical scenes of chivalry" (160), sometimes with a "modern inflection" (see the striking cover of the book), and often employed to get people to buy war bonds; second, postcards depicting "'reverse chivalry" (160), generally attacking German soldiers and the Kaiser as villainous examples of chivalry; third, images of the "knight's imitation of Christ's life and death" (160). The author concludes that English artists "treat chivalry as a historical phenomenon," whereas German, Austrian, and Russian artists succeed in showing "knights in dynamic relation to the war" (161). The pictorial material in this chapter is stunning, and the discussion powerful. While Frantzen generally is very evenhanded and unbiased in his treatment of the nationalities of World War I, an occasional off comment sneaks in. For example, in his discussion of Plate 8a, a grouping of German men, he describes them as all having "the same alarmingly blue eyes and blond hair" (171), although he never comments on the fact that the German soldier in Plate 8c looks swarthy and the one in Plate 9a has dark brown skin.
Chapter Eight, "'Greater love than this': Memorials of the Great War," mirrors Chapter seven in its approach, juxtaposing primarily English (Suffolk) and German (Bavaria) war memorials because of the medieval legacy of St. Edmund in Bury as well as the Catholic makeup of Bavaria. In Bury, Frantzen found no connection in the war memorials to St. Edmund in specific or medieval iconography in general. In more rural Suffolk memorials, a medieval connection surfaced in the form of St. George, which makes me wonder at the inclusion of the large section on St. Edmund earlier. Two thirds of the chapter are dedicated to Bavarian memorials, which show greater diversity than their English counterparts, for instance, including the perspectives of non-combatants. The previous chapter on postcards and postcards also emphasized German examples; therefore, I question why the author did not develop a German nineteenth-century perspective (Frantzen had said that his discussion of the medieval material is representative). Chapter Six describes in great detail the revival of medieval material in England, complete with historical analysis. Certainly, the German nineteenth century, still struggling with the formation of a national state, did not have an analogous development to the British Empire. Frantzen professes early on that he is interested in "points of continuity" (2) from medieval chivalry to World War I; therefore, the book could have benefited from continuity on the German side as well, especially since the bulk of World War I examples is German. Chapters Seven and Eight also exhibit a number of transcription errors from and typos in the German, a few awkward translations, and the misplacement of Bavaria into the southwest of Germany.
In the concluding chapter, "Circles of Grief: Chivalry and the Heart of Sacrifice," Frantzen returns to solid English ground, discussing Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, Wilfred Owen's trench poetry, and letters by two British soldiers, illustrating sacrificial and self-sacrificial attitudes. No German, French or Russian literary examples--which exist as well--are included. Overall Frantzen makes a valuable contribution with Bloody Good, whetting the reader's appetite to learn more. The book is written in jargon-free language with smooth transitions between chapters. Both medievalists and history buffs can learn a lot from the informative detail discussions in this study.
Throughout the book, the author tries to impress upon the reader that medieval knights as practitioners of violence needed to restrain and modulate this violence through self-discipline and antisacrifice. In light of recent events and war correspondent Chris Hedges' book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Public Affairs, 2002), chronicling his first-hand experience in the wars and conflicts of the last twenty years, I cannot help but conclude that sacrificial and self-sacrificial attitudes are alive and well today, but the medieval antisacrifical response never made it out of the nineteenth century.