DANTE AND
VIOLENCE Domestic, Civic, and Cosmic
BRENDA DEEN SCHILDGEN
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
A B O U T T H E W I L L I A M A N D K AT H E R I N E DEVERS SERIES IN DANTE AND M E D I E VA L I TA L I A N L I T E R AT U R E
The William and Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies at the University of Notre Dame supports rare book acquisitions in the university’s John A. Zahm Dante collections, funds an annual visiting professorship in Dante studies, and supports electronic and print publication of scholarly research in the field. In collaboration with the Medieval Institute at the university, the Devers program initiated a series dedicated to the publication of the most significant current scholarship in the field of Dante studies. In 2011 the scope of the series was expanded to encompass thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury Italian literature. In keeping with the spirit that inspired the creation of the Devers program, the series takes Dante and medieval Italian literature as focal points that draw together the many disciplines and lines of inquiry that constitute a cultural tradition without fixed boundaries. Accordingly, the series hopes to illuminate this cultural tradition within contemporary critical debates in the humanities by reflecting both the highest quality of scholarly achievement and the greatest diversity of critical perspectives. The series publishes works from a wide variety of disciplinary viewpoints and in diverse scholarly genres, including critical studies, commentaries, editions, reception studies, translations, and conference proceedings of exceptional importance. The series enjoys the support of an international advisory board composed of distinguished scholars and is published regularly by the University of Notre Dame Press. The Dolphin and Anchor device that appears on publications of the Devers series was used by the great humanist, grammarian, editor, and typographer Aldus Manutius (1449–1515), in whose 1502 edition of Dante (second issue) and all subsequent editions it appeared. The device illustrates the ancient proverb Festina lente, “Hurry up slowly.” Zygmunt G. Barański, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., and Christian Moevs, editors
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii Texts and Translations xvii
Introduction: Violence in the Commedia 1 chapter one
Freedom, Natural Law, and Love 00
c h a p t e r t wo
Violence in the Domestic Sphere in the Commedia 000
chapter three chapter four
Killing Fields and the Cross in the Heavens 00 Redemptive Violence: The Cross, Sacrifice, and the “Giusta Vendetta” 000
Conclusion: Violence, Poetry, and History 000
Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index
000
Introduction Violence in the Commedia
To write of violence in Dante’s Commedia might at first glance appear to belabor the obvious. When they first read of the horrific punishments assigned to those condemned in hell, even callow undergraduates, used to the expansive brutality of video games and contemporary media-vision, are shocked by the poem’s gruesome violence. Eternally howling winds, torrents of rain, mud, and fire; lakes of ice, rivers of blood, perpetually itching sores; eternally maimed, entombed, drowning, and dismembered or frozen bodies: such are the wages of sin in the Inferno. We see enacted a brutal application of the lex talionis, a system of retribution demanding an “eye for an eye,” a judicial system that Dante assigns to God’s eschatological justice. These concrete punishments have led to the accusation that Dante is a “hyena,” who makes poetry in a cemetery (Nietzsche), or a “mystical sadist” whose system of punishment constitutes a vendetta that goes far beyond the limits of what humans might consider justice. Some twentieth-century theologians have held Dante’s persuasive infernal vision partly responsible for reinforcing the idea of a frightening and vengeful divinity at the expense of a loving God.1 Dante’s visceral representation of violence clearly refuses to hide its repugnance, making him a forceful witness in exposing its brutal consequences. The purgative punishments of the second realm represent many other types of violence against the body. Dante leads us to believe that intellectual or appetitive sins, such as pride, wrath, avarice, envy, and other moral failures caused the enmity that ruptures community and condemns sinners to their specific bodily punishments in hell or penance in purgatory. This aesthetic version of the torment of wrongdoers in the other world also emphasizes what we all know: Dante 1
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lived in a dangerous time and had no doubt witnessed many disturbing scenes in his own world not unlike those of his infernal other world. His brilliant synthesis of myth, history, legend, literature, and contemporary life, stemming from ancient or modern times, belies any effort to confine his work to the field of literary studies alone. Indeed, if we contextualize the Commedia in its times, we can also consider it an anthology of contemporary crimes, with Dante making his imagined divine system of just condemnation or vendetta modeled on current ideas of human justice.2 However, in this book I do not focus on Dante’s rendition of violent punishment in the poem. Rather, I examine how the Commedia represents interpersonal, collective, and cosmic violence or coercion in the three spheres of the poet’s historic world: (1) the household; (2) civic and political domains; (3) the divine or cosmic realm. Including social coercion such as forced marriages and unnatural death, be it interpersonal (uxoricide or vendetta) violence, civic or intercivic conflict, or redemptive deicide, these three areas present a panoramic view of the kinds of violence that were constitutive of fourteenth-century Italian life. The interpersonal and collective violence the poem features and condemns were often socially and politically sanctioned, or even structured into social behavior—forced marriages (Inf. 5 and Par. 3), personal vendetta (Inf. 29), or even hunger towers (Inf. 33), for example—despite the fact that they invariably violated moral and legal codes. Violence could be experienced everywhere, in visual art, where the suffering corpus of Christ or the pained bodies of martyrs took on greater importance from the thirteenth century onward, or in poetic form, in the legacy of Roman poetry, encyclopedias, chronicles, and in medieval epic and chivalric literature, all abundant with battle-scene mayhem, rape, and blood feud. Violence in the home, in city life, in intercity warfare, or in pan-European conflict in real time matched these artistic and literary bellicose scenes. Dante’s treatment of violence in the Commedia has not been explored systematically, a point made in a recent article by Zygmunt Barański, where he, remarking on how the question of violence is strewn across Dante’s works, notes what little attention Dantisti have given to the question in the Commedia. Bara ski also makes the impor-
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tant point that Dante’s literary sources were riddled with violence, in ancient and medieval epics, historical writing, or the visual representations all around him, yet scholars have ignored the topic in Dante’s work.3 Manuele Gragnolati’s discussion of the experiences of the disembodied yet pained souls of purgatory does address a productive type of violence in the Commedia.4 Scholars have examined Dante’s treatment of war and also peace, including Jeffrey Schnapp, Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante’s Paradise, and a recent collection of essays edited by John Barnes and Daragh O’Connell. Also, Dante’s use of martial references and metaphors in the Commedia has received attention.5 Richard Lansing, “Dante’s Concept of Violence and the Chain of Being” (1981), defines violence in the poem as “yielding to unnatural and therefore inherently bad passions,” and sets out some important groundwork, perhaps most importantly that Dante does not define violence. Rather, “Dante gives the reader more than one concept or definition to work with; at times such plurality precludes total harmony of thought within the system.”6 Modern theories about violence—psychological, sociological, or political—have tended to uphold what is now labeled the “orthodox” theory. Followers of this theory argue that the emergence of a strong state suppressed interpersonal violence, and that the stronger the state, the greater the likelihood of a reduction in violence, resulting in a decline from medieval to modern times. This “orthodox” theory has long standing in the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin, for example, in an essay written in the wake of World War I, examined how state power assumes control of violence. However, Benjamin asked if this led to “just” or “unjust” ends. The essay’s prescience showed particular relevance to the state-mandated genocide twenty years later in Germany.7 More recently, writing only about Western Europe, and supporting the thesis of an accelerated decline in interpersonal violence, Robert Muchembled notes that the high levels of interpersonal violence in the medieval period had fallen to roughly half by the first half of the seventeenth century, and by the 1960s had dropped to a tenth of the numbers of the thirteenth century.8 Norbert Elias, in a book written in 1939, argued that the change in the masculine idea of honor and the consequent reduction in interpersonal conflict first led to pacifying the public
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square and then to the internal space of the family, in what he labeled a “civilizing process.”9 Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, dramatizes this process to show how the public feud contaminates the domestic space, where civic feuding between magnate families spills onto the streets, encouraging public brawling and vendetta among the youth of opposing groups. The feud simultaneously directs connubial alliances in the domestic space. With public conciliation through a love-marriage prohibited, the feuding parties reconcile only after the secret alliance between two members of the competing parties results in the death of the young couple, making them both public and domestic victims. Shaming the society and crushing both families with the tragic loss of their children, the feud finally leads the prince, as representative of the state, to publicly recognize his failure to address the conflict that poisoned both street and household. The Romeo and Juliet case epitomizes the difficulty of separating the public from private realms in the early modern period. Although modern post-Enlightenment thinking tends to separate the domestic as private from the civic and political domains as public, I hope to show that in medieval practice, at least in the cases Dante features, because power alliances drove both family and civil relationships, the domestic/private and the civic/public were often tightly intertwined, with violence in the public sphere reverberating in the private, and vice versa. The cause célèbre of this pattern is the historical fact of a century of Florentine intracity strife between the Donati and the Amidei and Uberti, the split between Guelfs and Ghibellines in the city, which Dante via his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida (Par.16.139–41), attributes to the betrayal of a betrothal promise.10 Dante draws out the overlap between the public and private (entirely true or not) in a number of cases. For example, the Paolo and Francesca story (Inf. 5.88–138) and the saga of Dante’s contemporaries in the Donati family both show how the intermingling of public and private had tragic results.11 Also, Bertran de Born, who sowed discord between father and son for political ends (Inf. 28.118–42), and Ugolino, whose young sons (in Dante’s version) were victims of a city’s discord (Inf. 33.1–90), provide further examples of how the public and private intersect. Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain, was among the first of modern theorists to assert that vi-
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olence was simultaneously personal and political: both state-mandated assaults and interpersonal violence traumatize bodies and minds, also making bystanders victims.12 Dante’s theology and ethics-centered position claims that disordered human power relations drive domestic or civic violence. The Redemption, an act of cosmic or universal violence, in contrast, as understood by medieval theologians, did not stem from an exercise of power, because a sacrificial gift to liberate humans from the tragic fall into sin impelled it. Despite this “civilizing process,” which Benjamin shows was a chimera, twentieth-century forms of violence remained widespread. Unlike medieval examples, and despite the aerial bombardments of World War II, it was often experienced at a distance (at least to those who live in Western Europe and North America).13 Henry Luce, writing even before the Shoah and Hiroshima/Nagasaki, said of the twentieth century, “So far, this century of ours has been a profound and tragic disappointment. . . . in no one century have so many men and women and children suffered such pain and anguish and bitter death.”14 Ute Volmerg, director of the Dharma Centre for Spiritual Development, contrasted medieval violence with modern versions to highlight the open wound of medieval violence versus the stealth status of modern cases: In the Middle Ages robbery, murder, mutilation, rape and oppression were daily occurrences; today we have the paradoxical situation, that in our daily lives we indeed feel more secure than people in former times, but we live in the immediate vicinity of potentials of violence and destruction of incomprehensible dimensions. . . . The horror is banned from public sight, placed in bunkers, buried and surrounded with barbed wire fences, it is hidden in the depths of the oceans, in space and in the desert.15 In fact, the theory that claims levels of interpersonal violence have declined throughout human history misrepresents the past and the present. It ignores the kinds of state-sponsored or state-caused violence that remain commonplace today, including torture, mass incarceration, genocide, forced migration, and civilian casualties in contemporary warfare (displacement, famine, violence against women and
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children, and death, for example),16 many the result of the strong state, and precisely the kinds of violence that Scarry examined in The Body in Pain. In recent times, particularly in the wake of 9/11, the new kinds of media coverage, in which everyone becomes a visual chronicler, foreground civilian casualties and the human suffering in conflict. Brad Evans writes, “If forms of dehumanization hallmarked the previous Century of Violence, in which the victim was often removed from the scene of the crime, groups such as ISIS foreground the human as a disposable category.”17 Dante’s many graphic scenes of humans as disposable confront this consequence of war and personal violence head-on. Besides the obvious example of the heap of broken bodies in the exordium to Inferno 28, Ugolino (Inf. 33) presents another case. He may epitomize bellicose treachery and deserve to be eternally damned, according to Dante’s system. But when Dante has him portray himself imprisoned in a tower to starve with his young children (a specific innovation of Dante’s since, according to the historical record, two of the children were grown men and two adolescents),18 he draws our attention to horrific war crimes. Viewed as a human being, Ugolino’s individuality and historicity seem to overwhelm his Christian-figural moralizing function. His tear-evoking narrative notwithstanding, as “the image of man,” he does not “eclipse the image of God,” as Erich Auerbach’s mimetic theory would have it.19 Still, the representation of the historical reality in his narrative, prompted by desire to elicit pity or by the actual facts of the case, certainly disrupts the illusion of the afterworld vision to impress us with its concrete ferocity. Emphasizing the hunger of the children and drawing in the empathy of his audience, Ugolino recounts that “pianger senti’ fra ’l sonno i miei figliuoli / ch’eran con meco, e dimandar del pane” (I heard my sons, who were with me, crying in their sleep and asking for bread) (Inf. 33.38–39). Then, he insinuates that he ate his starved and already dead children, “Poscia, più che ’l dolor, poté ’l digiuno” (Then fasting had more power than grief) (Inf. 33.75), who, in the poet’s words, the city of Pisa had crucified “porre a tal croce” (put on such a cross) (Inf. 33.87).20 This multilayered performance in which the treacherous Ugolino seeks his listeners’ sympathy through its focus on the children’s suffering also provides Dante-poet the op-
Introduction
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portunity to reveal his own appalled aversion to this new Thebes, the quintessential city of fratricidal warfare. The cinematographic view of Ugolino gnawing on his enemy’s head, “come ’l pan per fame si manduca” (as bread is eaten by the starving) (Inf. 32.127), captures the cannibalistic furor of civil conflict to expose the horror of Dante’s contemporary reality and his own scornful reproach. To contrast our own times with Dante’s, seeking to avoid collective punishment in war zones, modern war conventions (Fourth Geneva Convention; article 4 on protected persons and article 50 on children [1949]), even if they are regularly violated, prohibit civilian punishment. But Dante’s shocking image of starving children in war, who emerge as Christlike sacrificial victims—“Padre mio, ché non m’aiuti?” (My father, why do you not help me?) (Inf. 33.69)—long before international treaties had recognized children as a barbarous casualty of war, represents this horrendous reality to his readers just as our own contemporary media has shown us the starving children in the wars in Ethiopia, Central America, Yemen, and elsewhere in the last forty years. In fact, Dante is not unique in singling out the immorality of killing innocents, as in his version of the fate of Ugolino’s children. Thomas Aquinas, it has recently been argued, held that foreknowingly (whether with certainty or probability) killing innocents in warfare (or any other circumstance) constituted an inherently illegitimate and unethical act. In this he differed from Augustine, who, though only allowing war under just circumstances (to be discussed in chapter 3), did accept that innocents would be casualties of war.21 For Aquinas, on the other hand, who also is addressing the killing of innocents, “Et ideo nullo modo licet occidere innocentem” (there is no justification for killing an innocent person) (ST II-II, q. 64, a. 6).22 Dante’s staging of the suffering of Ugolino’s innocent children seems to follow Aquinas here. The “orthodox” view of violence that claims a radical decline in interpersonal conflict among some modern scholars leads to characterizing cultures outside the European state model or earlier periods before the modern state, especially the Middle Ages, as uncivilized barbarity. But, Stuart Carroll, in a provocative article on historical understandings of violence, argues that “violence is rooted in feelings and beliefs, and these are shaped by experience and the social environment.”23 He
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writes, “All kinds of everyday violence—squabbles over honor, wifebeating, masculine competition, and rites of passage—are conducted according to socially agreed limits.”24 In almost a case study of Carroll’s idea, Andrea Zorzi, scholar of the Italian medieval period, argues that rather than just deep-seated animosities and power conflicts on the opposing sides (magnates and merchants, for example), formal conventions (connected to friendship and animosity) regulated the outbreak of feuds in the thirteenth-century communes. These conventions were inscribed in written codes of engagement, such as Albertano da Brescia’s Liber de doctrina dicendi et tacendi.25 This approach to understanding the sources of endemic social and political violence suggests that rather than being strictly a result of a civic failure—a lack of institutional control—interpersonal and civic violence is more often than not socially sanctioned. In considering these modern studies of violence, one cannot avoid noting the twentieth century’s brutality of 100 million people dead, forced removals, starvation, rape, and genocide as a result of collective violence, which has led to the modern heightened consciousness of systemic factors.26 In this book, I seek to show that Dante, the medieval poet, six centuries ago, had a similar repugnance to the horror of violence and exposed the cruelty and suffering it caused with intense detail. Addressing an absence in the critical repertoire of Dante scholarship, I explore how Dante’s vision of the eschatological consequences of violence in the home and in society not only condemns its unnatural brutality but also seeks to show that it violates both the natural and civil law of his times. Even though the entire Commedia interrogates how unnatural appetites result in violence that ruptures community, Dante’s use of the words “vïolenza,” “vïolenta,” and “vïolenti” is rather limited.27 In Convivio, “morte vïolenta” (violent death) refers to the type of death that goes against nature (Conv. 4.23.8), as in the Commedia where “vïolento” is used only for nonnatural causes of death (Inf. 11.40; 29.31), specifically murder, suicide, or death in combat, but that would certainly include starving someone to death. Although uxoricide would qualify as an act of violence, forced marriages would not. In the only case of the word used as a substantive, Virgil-personaggio explains how
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the “vïolenti” against others, self, God, and nature are condemned to the first division of lower hell (Inf. 11.28–51). The river of blood contains the tyrants guilty of “vïolenza” (Inf. 12.48). Geri del Bello’s “vïolenta morte,” that is, murder, has not been avenged (Inf. 29.31). Dante’s association of violence with blood as the unnatural effusion of “sangue” features prominently in Inferno. It contrasts with “blood lines” or kinship, as Dante-pilgrim, “un spirto del mio sangue” (a spirit of my blood) (Inf. 29.20), Ugo Capeto (Purg. 20.62, 83), or Cacciaguida, “O sanguis meus” (Par.15.28) intend.28 “Sangue,” as shed, spilled, or spilling, the result of violence, can be Christ’s redemptive blood or the blood of martyrs, as in St. Peter’s speech in Paradiso 27, or it can result from unjust war or vengeance.29 Thus, blood in the Commedia, as Anne Leone has written, though it signifies the interconnection of the parts of the body, parents to children, relatives to the family, individuals to the community, and humanity to God through the Incarnation and Redemption, also reveals “evidence of violence—that a community or a body has been torn apart,” for Dante features “the enormity of what is wasted when blood is spilled.”30 As witness to unnatural death, blood is the sign of violence in domestic, public, and cosmic space. For example, Francesca and Paolo “tignemmo il mondo sanguigno” (stained the world blood-red) (Inf. 5.90), and Buonconte di Montefeltro was “sanguinando il piano” (bloodying the plain) (Purg. 5.99) as he fled the field of battle. It occurs a significant four times in Inferno 12, in the river of blood where tyrants “dier nel sangue” (put their hands to blood) (Inf. 12.105). In Inferno 13, the domain of the bleeding trees of the suicides, it occurs three times. Likewise, there are three instances in Inferno 28: the first two (Inf. 28.2, 9) describe the bloody scene before the pilgrim, likening it to the blood shed on the “fortunata terra di Puglia” (travailed earth of Apulia) (Inf. 28.8–9), and the third characterizes Mosca’s bloody face (Inf. 28.105). Blood is not a metaphor in these instances but a concrete substance, a visible mark of a violently aborted life that reveals the sinner’s corruption and simultaneous contamination of the perfect blood (“sangue perfetto”) (Purg. 25.37) that creates life. Statius-personaggio explains that human generation in Purgatorio 25 (34–108), semen, as a form of refined or digested blood, combines with “altrui sangue in natural vasello” (another’s
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blood in a natural vessel) (Purg. 25.45) to form new life.31 Leone has argued that Dante contrasts generative and violent implications of blood; the former creates new life, ties families and communities together, or is offered for mankind’s redemption in the blood of martyrs and Christ’s sacrifice.32 The word “vïolenza” appears a significant three times in Paradiso 4, which addresses a core issue for understanding the system of justice that undergirds the entire poem. We will discuss this in greater detail in chapter 2 on violence in the domestic sphere. Here Dante, through Beatrice, ties violence to human will, whether the perpetrator’s or the recipient’s, to explain that the will can operate even when coercion restricts it, by physical or social force. The canto begins with Beatrice addressing Dante’s perplexity about how someone else’s violence can be held against the victim: “la vïolenza altrui per qual ragione / di meritar mi scema la misura?” (by what accounting does another’s violence lessen the measure of my deserving?) (Par. 4.20–21). She answers this rhetorical question with a long discourse on the will, specifically in relationship to force or violence against its freedom: “Se vïolenza è quando quel che pate nïente conferisce a quel che sforza, non fuor quest’ alme per essa scusate: che volontà, se non vuol, non s’ammorza, ma fa come natura face in foco, se mille volte vïolenza il torza.” (Par. 4.73–78) “If violence is when one that undergoes it contributes nothing to what does the forcing, these souls were not excused by it: for the will, if it does not will, cannot be extinguished but does as Nature does in fire, though violence thwart it a thousand times.” Beatrice’s presupposition, that the victim of violence did not comply with the force, does not exculpate him or her. Why? Because, she maintains, violence cannot thwart the human will, which by analogy she links to a natural force, “che volontà, se non vuol, non s’ammorza, / ma fa come natura face in foco” (for the will, if it does not will,
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cannot be extinguished but does as Nature does in fire). The human will has the capacity to be adamant, to burn like fire, but if it wavers, “segue la forza” (it seconds the force) (Par. 4.80). Although she addresses only interpersonal (and a specific case of family violence) rather than collective violence here, she does insist that if the individual subject succumbs to the violence, at that point he or she participates in it even if unwillingly. In addition, Dante uses “vïolenza” to signify its potential for redemption, and specifically contrasts violence spurred by “caldo amore” (burning love) and “viva speranza” (lively hope) to the “unnatural” kind that confiscates another human’s life, “non a guisa che l’omo a l’om sobranza” (not as one man defeats another) (Par. 20.94–97). In this, he contrasts two kinds of violence, one is redemptive and the other is unnatural death. The transfigured eagle in the Heaven of Jupiter, apprehending Dante’s incredulity when he sees Trajan and Ripheus, two pagans, in paradise, explains: Regnum celorum vïolenza pate da caldo amore e da viva speranza, che vince la divina volontate: non a guisa che l’omo a l’om sobranza, ma vince lei perché vuole esser vinta, e, vinta, vince con sua beninanza. (Par. 20.94–99) Regnum celorum suffers the violence of burning love and lively hope that overcome God’s will: not as one man defeats another, but they conquer it because it wishes to be conquered and, conquered, conquers with its good will. Here in the Heaven of Just Rulers, Dante-poet, justifying the “violence” of these rulers, adopts the language of conquest, using the rhetorical ploy gradatio for repetitive emphasis (vince . . . / . . . esser vinta, / e, vinta, vince). The divinity “vïolenza pate” (suffers violence) in an echo of Matthew 11:12, as love and hope vanquish God’s will, a conquest contrary to man-to-man combat because he “vuole esser vinta” (wants to be conquered). A parallel idea of the divinity suffering
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violence, as an act of divine will, informs the Redemption, as we will discuss in chapter 4. Monarchia also addresses both destructive and redemptive forms of violence, wherein Dante essentially condones the Roman violence that led to Pax Romana, on grounds that Roman wars were part of the divine plan (Mon. 2.11.7).33 Still, in the Commedia and Monarchia, only the divinity, or his scribe in the Commedia, Dante, define “just” violence, whether in warfare (both actual and theological) or through the Redemption. But, in the Commedia, the same scribe emphasizes the merciful divinity, signaled in St. Peter’s instructions to the angel guardian at the gates of purgatory, who explains the purpose of his keys to the pilgrim: “Da Pier le tegno; e dissemi ch’i’ erri / anzi ad aprir ch’a tenerla serrata” (From Peter I have them; and he told me to err rather in opening than in keeping closed) (Purg. 9.127–28). Dante condemns the violence that breaks the natural bonds of love in domestic and civic realms on philosophical and ethical grounds. He graphically represents the consequences of these kinds of violence, but he lauds just war as redemptive violence, and even if it too inflicts pain, he conceals its wounds.34 He also demonstrates the role of violence in purgation in order to depict the “productive pain” experienced by the sinners in purgatory.35 The Crucifixion, the culmination of the divine intervention into history in which the divinity suffered death as a criminal, and the many examples of imitatio Christi the poem features constitute redemptive violence.
Violence in Dante’s Time “forato ne la gola, fuggendo a piede e sanguinando il piano.” (Purg. 5.98–99) “pierced in the throat, fleeing on foot, and bloodying the plain.” Dante’s image of an arrow-pierced throat and blood on the plain contrasts with the images of chivalrous knights and ladies that have in-