{"id":36319,"date":"2016-11-14T02:00:31","date_gmt":"2016-11-14T07:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36319"},"modified":"2016-11-12T09:56:57","modified_gmt":"2016-11-12T14:56:57","slug":"he-should-have-subtitled-it-500-years-of-aristocratic-testosterone-poisoning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/11\/14\/he-should-have-subtitled-it-500-years-of-aristocratic-testosterone-poisoning\/","title":{"rendered":"“… he should have subtitled it, ‘500 Years of Aristocratic Testosterone Poisoning'”"},"content":{"rendered":"

M. Harold Page<\/a>, guest-posting at Charles Stross’s blog:<\/p>\n

Every so often, somebody posts some wistful meme about how nice it would be if duelling were legal again.<\/p>\n

I’m increasingly less gentle in my response. Partly I don’t want non-sword folk to start to thinking of Historical European Martial Arts as some kind of Fascist death cult (we really aren’t, and we’re a very geeky and inclusive movement).<\/p>\n

Mostly though, as a historical novelist, swordsman, and father of a teenage boy, I can tell you that duelling was — and — a bloody stupid idea.<\/p>\n

Look, I like swords. Love them, even.<\/p>\n

I revel in their history, evolution and context. I get a buzz from handling originals — earlier this year, I examined a well-notched sword from the Battle of Castillon and I could almost hear<\/em> the English army annihilating itself by charging a superior force in entrenched positions.<\/p>\n

Most of all, I like fighting with swords or writing about people fighting with swords; Zornhau!<\/em><\/p>\n

All this is what leads me to think duelling is essentially a bloody stupid idea.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

People talk airily about duelling as a “safety valve” or a “test of manhood”.<\/p>\n

However, consider what happens when it’s OK and almost mandatory for young men to challenge each other to mortal combat for reasons that can best be called whimsical…<\/p>\n

Alfred Hutton — one of the saints of the modern Historical European Martial Arts movement (real soldier, instructor of sabre to the British Army, early investigator of Medieval martial arts treatises) — wrote a wonderful book called The Sword and the Centuries<\/em> in which he gathered all the anecdotes of tournaments and duelling he could find. Honestly, he should have subtitled it, “500 Years of Aristocratic Testosterone Poisoning<\/em>“.<\/p>\n

Especially if you are the parent of a young man, or have ever sustained a sword injury, the sections on French duelling culture are truly horrific. Duelling wasn’t so much a safety valve as a public health emergency.<\/p>\n

We’re talking young men going out for a bottle of wine and coming back in a hearse because another youth caught their eye in the wrong way and they felt impelled to issue an immediate challenge.<\/p>\n

We’re talking three versus three duels where a stranger gallantly — read bloody stupidly — offers to make up the missing third on one side. And almost everybody dies. <\/p>\n

Reading between the lines, we’re also talking appalling peer pressure, bullying and legitimised murder — a duel is an awfully handy way of getting rid of an unwanted heir or rival.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M. Harold Page, guest-posting at Charles Stross’s blog: Every so often, somebody posts some wistful meme about how nice it would be if duelling were legal again. I’m increasingly less gentle in my response. Partly I don’t want non-sword folk to start to thinking of Historical European Martial Arts as some kind of Fascist death […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7],"tags":[262,139,678],"class_list":["post-36319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","tag-culture","tag-psychology","tag-swords"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9rN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36319"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36320,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36319\/revisions\/36320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}