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11 - Fighting or flyting? Verbal duelling in mid-sixteenth-century Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2009

Trevor Dean
Affiliation:
Roehampton Institute, London
K. J. P. Lowe
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Summary

A voluntary fight between two men, by which one intends to prove to the other with weapons, by his own prowess, secure from interference, in the space of one day, that he is a man worthy of honour, not to be despised or offended, while the other intends to prove the contrary.

By this famous mid sixteenth-century definition of the duel of honour, the case that follows was a non-event, a duel that never happened. Yet, in its own way it was a duel, fought between two men over a question of honour, according to a formal scenario. In place of swords and daggers they fought with words – thousands and thousands of words – over a period of many days. In sixteenth-century Italy verbal duelling seems to have been more common than the other kind, a fact noted but not well explained by contemporary observers and modern historians. So I will tell the story as a case history, giving a too-pale account of its florid and relentless exchanges, and make some tentative suggestions about the social significance of Italian verbal duelling.

To make sense of the story, readers need to be familiar with the typical scenario and terminology of the Renaissance duel. The classic paradigm goes like this.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1994

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