{"product_id":"from-chivalry-to-terrorism-isbn-9780679768302","title":"From Chivalry to Terrorism","description":"Manliness has always been linked to physical prowess and to war; indeed the warrior has been the archetypal man across countless cultures throughout time. In this magisterial excursion through literature, history, warfare, and sociology, one of our most prominent scholars tracks the complex relationship between the changing methods and goals of warfare and shifting models of manhood. This journey takes us from the citizen soldiers of ancient Greece to the medieval knights to the misogynistic terrorists of Al Qaeda. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs he chronicles these transformations, Leo Braudy weighs the significance of everything from weapon technology to the hairstyles favored during different eras. He offers fresh insights on codes of war and codes of racial purity, and on cultural and historical figures from Socrates to Don Quixote to Napoleon to Custer to Rambo. Epic in scope and free of academic jargon, \u003cb\u003eFrom Chivalry to Terrorism\u003c\/b\u003e is a masterwork of scholarship that is both accessible and breathtakingly ambitious.“History in the grand manner, pulled off with brilliance, wonderful imagination and considerable erudition. . . . Fascinating.” \u003ci\u003e— The Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“History at its most powerful. It is impossible to do justice to the range of fascinating material in this book.” \u003ci\u003e–Los Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The reader is left marveling. . . . An expansive, ambitious project.”  \u003ci\u003e–San Francisco Chronicle \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A terrific topic . . . The book displays Braudy’s loving immersion in his subject, fine grasp of historical complexity, and aversion for glib or dogmatic judgments.” \u003ci\u003e–The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A vivid, hugely ambitious book . . . Likely to be widely read.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003eLeo Braudy is University Professor and Bing Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He previously taught at Yale, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a Senior Scholar Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, as well as a writer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. His book, \u003cb\u003eJean Renoir: The World of His Films\u003c\/b\u003e, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Another of his books, \u003cb\u003eThe Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History\u003c\/b\u003e, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written for the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eHarper's\u003c\/i\u003e. Mr. Braudy lives with his wife in Los Angeles.1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eREMEMBER MY NAME\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike the elephant sought by the six blind men, or the electron that  changes position depending on when it is observed, masculinity must be  mapped rather than merely discovered. Not only is it elusive, but there  are also those with vested interests in keeping it mono-lithic and  mysterious. Is masculinity, for example, entirely identifiable with  patriarchy? That is, does masculinity in any age refer primarily to the  power over groups considered to be weaker and more marginal to  society-groups usually composed of women but also of men considered to  be at best incomplete or imperfect, and at worst barely human?  Certainly there have been many men, both in and out of public power,  who believed and still believe this. But how was their own masculinity  learned? Did it come directly from the experience of having the  particular kind of male body their culture approved? Or are there a  whole variety of preliminary and partial models, each with its own  divergence from the grand norm and each with its contradiction of it?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne clue might be in the language of masculinity. Where do the words  designating the male come from? What do they mean? In the West at  least, this language has been heavily influenced by both the language  of wartime masculinity (or fashioned in contrast to the language used  to describe, say, the saint or the sage) and the language of social  class. Man existed long before \"masculine,\" a word that first appears  in English in the Middle Ages as a French import used to designate not  specific masculine characteristics so much as the general difference  between male and female, whether in plants, animals, or human beings.  Then, with the Norman conquest and the adoption of Norman-French as the  standard for all educated discourse, \"masculine\" became a more frequent  usage.*\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Man,\" as the older term, has a more tangled history. It goes back to  an Indo-European root meaning \"earth\" that descends equally into  \"human\" and \"humus.\" There are two Latin words for man: vir and homo.  Homo, related to the Greek word for \"one\" or \"single,\" is the more  general term-man in the abstract. It descends into the Romance  languages fairly directly: uomo (Italian), homme (French), hombre  (Spanish), and the impersonal pronoun in French, on. Vir in contrast  refers to a man as defined by specific male qualities, and is the root  of \"virile\" as well as \"virtue,\" an association that prompted Plutarch  in his biography of Coriolanus to complain that the Romans so valued  military prowess that they made it stand for all human virtues, even  though it refers to only one of them. Arma virumque cano, says Virgil  at the beginning of the Aeneid, his epic poem of the founding of Rome:  \"I sing of arms and the man.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnlike \"masculine\" and \"feminine,\" which come from Latin, the immediate  origin of \"man\" in English is Germanic. Like \"masculine,\" \"man\" exists  not as a concept in itself but amid an array of other possibilities:  man as distinguished from boy, man as distinguished from woman, man as  distinguished from beast, man as distinguished from demon, man as  distinguished from gods and God. And perhaps the English embrace of the  German man owes something to its similarity to the Latin manus,  commonly \"hand\" but also a Roman legal term for the authority that a  husband has over his wife.†\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMuch of human ritual and social organization, from the earliest tribes to contemporary societies, is preoccupied with reaffirming these  distinctions-perhaps suggesting a deep-rooted human (or masculine) fear  that they are arbitrary enough to be constantly in danger of erosion or  forfeit. Like all distinctions, they are especially clouded in times  like war, when events have pushed people, families, tribes, kingdoms,  and nations to the edge. In this sense, much social ritual-initiation,  marriage, preparation for war-is exorcism: the casting out of what is  feared and the affirmation of what is desired. At these moments, the  normal fuzziness and uncertainty of boundaries, the lack of sharp  differences between aspects of human nature, have to be policed and  polarized for fear that otherwise they will collapse entirely.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e* \"Masculine\" comes from the Latin masculinus, which is itself a  diminutive form of the adjective mas, meaning \"male.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e† To this list might be added man as distinguished from eunuch, to  account for the Romanian word for man, barbat (bearded).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eContrary to the argument that patriarchal society consistently values  the masculine in any polarized distinction, \"man\" is not always the  superior term in all groups. Latin writers often used homo to refer to  a man who is somehow not free, whether socially subordinate or  otherwise dependent-a meaning retained in the modern use of \"homage,\"  which originally referred to the feudal ceremony of allegiance of a  vassal to his lord. Similarly, one of the earliest uses of man in Old  English was to designate a subordinate, a vassal, even a servant, as in  the phrase \"my man,\" and the early frequency of a phrase like \"free  man\" implies that perhaps men in general were not free. It took some  time before all men were said to be created equal, and it is not until  the eighteenth century that \"man\" was used to refer to some abstract  idea of human nature in general. Until then, the positive connotations  of \"man\" referred almost exclusively to the behavior (often military)  of a man of rank, an aristocrat, as in the suggestive relation in  German between heer (army) and the honorific herr (lord, master).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt may seem to be an occasion for obvious Freudian mockery that a  frequent Anglo-Saxon word for male human beings as well as animals is  wæpned (weaponed). But even though wæpen could also mean \"penis,\" we  should remember that only a particular class of men had the wealth and  the social sanction to carry weapons, and so the interplay between the  words for \"man,\" the words for \"man of high rank,\" and the words for  \"warrior\" has a long history. Thus in the eighth-century heroic poem  Beowulf, written in Anglo-Saxon but telling the story of a  sixth-century hero of the Danes, man appears in such compounds as feond  mancynnes (enemy of mankind), while what translators usually call  \"manly behavior\" or \"heroic prowess\" is referred to as eorlic ellen  (the power of an earl, or noble) while \"manly deeds\" are eorlscipe  efnde (the doings of earlship). Similarly, in The Song of Roland, an  eleventh-century poem written about events of the eighth century, when  a knight of Charlemagne's host fights with particular bravery, he is  described as being en guise de baron, a phrase usually translated as  \"valiantly\" or \"heroically,\" but which literally means \"in the manner  of a baron.\" Some centuries before, baron had been the French word that  generally distinguished the male from the female. By the eleventh  century, in a process similar to that undergone by the words for  \"knight,\" baron appears as an actual social title for those  high-ranking warriors who (as in The Song of Roland) support a  higher-ranking lord or king. The title, of course, still remains in  English, long since divested of its exclusively warlike implications.  In Spanish it has gone back down the social scale to survive as varón-a  man in general.*\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eApart from the words themselves, much of the talk about what is \"true\"  masculinity has also historically been tinged with, even steeped in,  nostalgia for a lost masculinity. Gilgamesh begins by describing  buildings of the past, \"which no latter-day king, no man alive can  equal.\" Even within the story of the Iliad itself, Nestor, the oldest  of the Achaeans, frequently refers to the much greater warriors who  walked the earth when he was younger, and he tries to instruct his  not-so-heroic present-day comrades (heroic enough to Homer's audience  and to us) in the fundamentals of battle tactics. With a similar  longing after past greatness, Chaucer's Knight in The Canterbury Tales,  who has come so quickly to the pilgrimage from war that his clothes are  still smeared with the rust of his chain mail, tells a tale set in  ancient Athens, when truly heroic knights fought for honor and the love  of women.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne important component of masculinity thus embodies a myth of  historical connection with past models and exemplars, while another  looks to a future that will be different. As the Greek hero had to die  young in the midst of battle in order to be considered a hero in song  and legend, so one powerful form of masculinity is perpetually  nostalgic in its judgments and standards. All the good men are already  dead. That's how we know they're good. They may be dead, but their  names and the masculinity they embodied live on to inspire future  generations, and to ensure that other young, unmarried boys, who are  not yet part of the settled social order, will go to war in the effort  to be real men.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo a certain extent this is not entirely propaganda. From the  impoverished medieval knight going to war to win estates and  possessions by capturing enemy nobles for ransom, to the immigrant and  ghetto-raised young men whose time in the army enables them to get an  education and status that could almost never have been achieved  outside, the military and especially wartime situations-with their  immediate rewards for battlefield heroics and cunning tactics-have  facilitated class change. In both hierarchic and democratic societies,  the melting pot of war, defined by its total difference from peacetime  stasis, has offered an outlet for otherwise stifled ambition. Periods  of war thus often give rise to eras of social movement and change, and  war's crucible of possibility has often engendered different ways of  being a man, on and off the battlefield, even while it seeks to confirm  the values of the past.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e* As baron goes up the scale of social and cultural value, another  early word for \"man,\" the Old Norse karl (Old English ceorl) goes down,  to become \"churl\" by Shakespeare's time. Compare the change from  \"villein\" (a peasant serf) to \"villain.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs the prime way of being a man, military masculinity thereby can  assume the double aspect of both future goal and lost ideal, both for  critics who are nostalgic for the past and for those who reject it  entirely. Already in the late third century b.c. the Roman playwright  Plautus, drawing on Aristophanes, had defined the stock type of the  miles gloriosus, the blowhard old soldier constantly living in a  fantasy of his past exploits. Shakespeare in his Henry plays splits  such a character in two-the hot-blooded chivalric knight Harry Hotspur  and the rollicking old campaigner Sir John Falstaff, both styles of  military masculinity that are finally superseded, for better or worse,  by the hard-edged pragmatism of Prince Hal, the future Henry V.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhether as criticism or idealization, the presence of prior types of  military masculinity in art and literature also implies a sense of  generational change, especially when the wars in question are civil  wars that divide families. The prewar and the postwar define a chasm  that lasts long after the generations who actually participated are  dead and gone. In the second half of the seventeenth century, both the  French and the English looked back over the divide of their civil wars  at the earlier part of the century as if it were an entirely different  world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA psychoanalytic perspective might call this conflict of male  generations oedipal, and thereby a \"natural\" part of the male  character. But such oedipal periods in culture are often brought into  being by the experience of war. During war, personal honor comes at the  expense of the enemy, but in times of peace it is the previous  generation that often must pay. In the third of Shakespeare's Henry VI  plays, which deal with the civil and foreign wars of fifteenth-century  England, he dramatizes the inhumanity of the conflict specifically  through an image of the clash of generations. In the midst of battle,  Henry VI sits despairingly on a molehill and observes first, as the  stage directions say, \"a Son who hath Killed his father\" and then \"a  Father that hath killed his son.\" Both enter bearing the bodies of  people they thought were their enemies and then discover to be their  kin. With less straightforward symbolism, the heroic plays of both  England and France in the later seventeenth century, in the wake of the  Thirty Years' War and the English Civil Wars, often feature conflicts  between energetic sons and repressive fathers over questions of honor  and duty. Likewise, after World War II, American westerns are shot  through with conflicts between fathers and sons (and occasionally  fathers and daughters). Red River (made in 1946-47 but not released  until 1948), directed by Howard Hawks, for example, explicitly presents  the conflict between father John Wayne and his adopted son Montgomery  Clift as mediated by Clift's Civil War experience. Both are good with  their guns, but Wayne's more brutal pioneering traits must be softened  by war and history into Clift's more vulnerable, sympathetic-and  successful-ones. Just as Hotspur in Henry V embodies an apolitical  aggressiveness that must be superseded by Henry's new version of the  warrior king, so in Red River, Wayne's outmoded, domineering, but still  nostalgically treasured masculinity finally has to reach some  accommodation with the ways of the new generation embodied by Clift.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 2\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTHE LANGUAGE OF THE BODY\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e(What do you see when you turn out the light?)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI can't tell you, but I know it's mine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e-John Lennon and Paul McCartney,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe prime reason many might think it unlikely that masculinity has  changed over time is the seemingly irreducible fact of the male body.  Until new weaponry and social change brought women into military ranks,  war was generally fought by men, whose physical nature seemed  especially suitable for its hardships. Male bodies are generally taller  and more robust than female, with longer, thicker muscles, and larger  lungs, heart, and limb-to-body ratios, as well as the inability to  become pregnant and thereby sacrifice valuable fighting time. In a  common metaphor of male-female difference, men are hard and women are  soft: \"matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,\" wrote Alexander Pope in  \"To a Lady,\" his poem on the characters of women. Pope himself was  about four-foot-six and suffered for most of his life from numerous  ailments, including tuberculosis of the spine. So the seemingly  absolute distinction between male and female in his hands carries an  ironic charge: being soft, women were changeable and malleable, but  also complex, while the hard, distinct male remained inflexibly the  same.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut in less self-aware contexts this robust male hardness and  imperviousness to change is itself unchangingly symbolized by the  upright sword, the obelisk, and the column-all too easily accepted as  figures for the aggressive and ever-ready penis, the most immediately  obvious physiological difference between male and female, the most  basic \"fact\" of all. In the imagery of the absolute biological  distinction between male and female, affirmed by the popular use of  Freudian formulas, the ritual phallus, the phallic symbol, and the  actual penis are one and the same.Author of The Frenzy of Renown","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303298781413,"sku":"NP9780679768302","price":29.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780679768302.jpg?v=1767727731","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/from-chivalry-to-terrorism-isbn-9780679768302","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}