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Chivalry revived & mechanical men Sit Dolor Amet
People were becoming more aware of the faster pace of change that came with being modern • Nation and mass army • Napoleonic Wars – mobility and revival of horse mounted soldier
As feudalism faded in the 15th century, • so did chivalry—but it popped up again in the 18th and 19th century when writers began to romanticize the Middle Ages. In 1790, for example, Irish statesman Edmund Burke took one look at the queen-killing French Revolution and bemoaned: • “The age of chivalry is gone that of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded: and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”
Burke wasn’t the only person • to belatedly announce the death of chivalry. In 1823, poet Lord Byron stated that chivalry was dead, and the 17th-century novel Don Quixote had killed it. Author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra had used Don Quixote to satirize chivalry, and Byron indignantly wrote that • “Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away; A single laugh demolished the right arm of his country.”
The chivalric concept • defense of church and the wrongfully oppressed, death before dishonor - had disappeared (if indeed it ever was more than a myth) by the Age of Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century Europe began to dominated by its scientific discoveries, its paid professional soldiers, its rising business class
Reason vs. Romanticism • It was now the Age of Enlightenment & Industrialization – new ideas & new goods but also the coldness of clockwork rationality and the noise, smoke and regimentation of the factory life. • As an antidote Romanticism & folklore began to thrive – people began looking toward the past – which resulted in Gothic and medieval revivals
Into the democratic materialism of the Industrial Revolution • leaped a group of idiosyncratic writers, architects, and painters waiting to lead a charge toward a new movement. They encouraged their countrymen to become latter-day knights and chivalrous gentlemen, replete with everything but the suits of armor.
The Victorian Gentleman is part of the Revival of Chivalry • Sir Walter Scott, Tennyson, Landseer, and Disraeli, among others, defined ''gentleman'' to the world - brave, loyal, true to his word, courteous, generous, and merciful. Of course this romantic concept had many flaws. The revived code of chivalry was elitist, Christian, sexist and it glorified war.
The Gothic Revival • and the rise of Romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were international phenomena Medieval-style jousts, for example, were regularly held in Sweden between 1777 and 1800.
Gothic novels, • such as The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and the many works of Sir Walter Scott popularized the idea of passionate romanticism and praise of chivalric ideals.
Medieval culture & its premodern values were spread by a growing mass press • The romanticized past was seen as an antidote to the modern enlightenment and industrial age. • Plays and theatrical works (such as a stage version of Scott’s Ivanhoe, which in 1820 was playing in six different productions in London alone) perpetuated the romanticism of knights, castles, feasts and tournaments.
Sir Walter Scott was the first British novelist to make a fortune by writing • 27 novels in 18 years. His popularity chiefly rests on his historical novels. In Scott´s day, Scotland had become settled and civilized. Edinburgh in particular -the Athens of the North- boasted a society as cultured as any in Europe and had produced such internationally renowned thinkers as the philosopher David Hume and the economist Adam Smith. Yet in 1745, only a generation before Scott´s birth, wild Highlanders had invaded England.
Scott was fascinated • by the Scottish past, its folklore, historical figures, the conflicts between clans or religious groups: Waverley, for instance, goes back to the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, Ivanhoe turns to English history - the rivalry between the Saxons and the Normans under Richard the Lionheart – Indeed Scott is responsible for furthering the legend of Robin Hood, which is a subplot in Ivanhoe
Ivanhoe • The emphasis of the book is on the conflict between the Saxons and the Normans; Ivanhoe--a Saxon knight loyal to a Norman king--emerges as a model of how the Saxons can adapt to life in Norman England. With its scenes of jousting knights, burning castles, and damsels in distress, Ivanhoe is one of the most popular historical romances of all time.
The Eglinton Tournament • Was a re-enactment of a medieval joust & revel held in Scotland on Friday 30 August 1839.It was funded and organized by Archibald, Earl of Eglinton, and took place at Eglinton Castle in Ayrshire. The Queen of Beauty was Georgiana, Duchess of Somerset. Many distinguished visitors took part, including Prince Louis Napoleon, the future Emperor of the French. • The Tournament drew 100,000 spectators. Problems were caused by rainstorms.
Inspired by Ivanhoe • Features of the tournament were taken from Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe: it was an attempt "to be a living re-enactment of the literary romances."
In Eglinton’s own words • "I am aware of the manifold deficiencies in its exhibition — more perhaps than those who were not so deeply interested in it; I am aware that it was a very humble imitation of the scenes which my imagination had portrayed, but I have, at least, done something towards the revival of chivalry."
Americans looked to Europe’s but also wanted to create their own myths, legends & literary traditions • Nathaniel Hawthorne is best known for his novels The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), his focus on history, morality, and religion, and his use of allegory and symbolism. • Herman Melville is best known for his novels of the sea, including his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851) Typee, a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia, and Billy Budd, a posthumously published novella.
Before Hawthorne & Melville Hugh Henry Brackenridge wrote Modern Chivalry • A rambling, satirical American novel by a Pittsburgh writer, lawyer, judge, and justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The book was first published in 1792.
The hero, Captain John Farrago, • is a frontier Don Quixote who leaves on a whim his Western Pennsylvania farm to • "ride about the world a little, with his man Teague at his heels, to see how things were going on here and there, and to observe human nature."
In the second half of the 19th century Mark Twain followed in the footsteps of Breckenridge using satire and humor to treat serious themes
Mark Twain lived in an era of profound scientific and technological change Samuel Longhorne Clemens • He was involved in geological and archeological digs. He was an avid reader in natural history, with a special interest in insects. He was an early adopter of inventions like the typewriter, the telephone (he claimed to have the first telephone in a private residence), and the bicycle, among others. • He was a friend to both Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla, visiting Tesla’s laboratory to be involved with experiments in electricity, and allowing Edison to both record his voice and film him with his moving camera. better known under his pen name, Mark Twain
In Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn • Huck and Jim board a wrecked steamboat. The steamboat is called the "Walter Scott." Twain often ridiculed Sir Walter Scott, whose novels epitomized the ideals of old-world chivalry. Twain saw Scott’s ideas as stilted, and he shows this by naming a sinking ship after the writer.
Also in Huckleberry Finn • The duke and the dauphin appear - A pair of con men whom Huck and Jim rescue as they are being run out of a river town. The older man, who appears to be about seventy, claims to be the “dauphin,” the son of King Louis XVI and heir to the French throne. This another slap by Twain at the phoniness of pretensions to a lost world of European glory.
Twain also wrote • The Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc • The Prince and Pauper
Twain’sConnecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court first published in 1889. • Is a burlesque of Romantic notions of chivalry inspired by a dream in which he was a knight himself, and severely inconvenienced by the weight and cumbersome nature of his armor.
Hank Morgan • Is a mechanic and foreman at a gun factory, is knocked unconscious and awakens in England in the year 528 CE. He is captured and taken to Camelot, where he is put on exhibit before the knights of King Arthur's Round Table.
Morgan • uses his knowledge of history and science to capture the heart of the King and his subjects, and to persuade them that he is a great magician who knows the future. He has great aptitude for inventing things and his mechanical skills help him establish his identity as a great modernizer in an uncivilized country.
When Merlin questions his credibility, • Morgan decides to teach the magician a lesson by blowing up his tower. He encourages the people to shed themselves of superstitious behaviors except those that make them think he is a great magician. His pride is his downfall. He alienated the people of Camelot by acting superior in wealth and intelligence, and by pushing too hard for things for which society is not yet prepared.
Hank • appears all along to reject the backward crudeness of Camelot and prefer instead the industry and technology of the nineteenth century. But in the end, as he is dying, he reveals his true calling, which is to be in the purity of Camelot, the place his progressive ideas destroyed.
L. Frank Baum was the first English-language author • to write about sentient mechanical beings. At the turn of the last century, however, neither "cyborg" nor "robot" had yet been coined; Baum's characters went by their proper names or descriptive terms such as "machine man."
The Tin Man 1900 • The Witch of the East cast a spell on an axe owned by a woodman named Nick Chopper. Each time the axe was used, it would cut off a part of Nick's body. A mysterious tinsmith replaced each severed body part until Nick was made completely of metal. Technically, the Tin Man is not a robot but a cyborg and a showcase of successful biomechanical transplant surgery
The Mechanical Man 1907 • built as a servant for King Evoldo of Ev, who named it "Tiktok" because of the noise it made when operating. Just before the King's suicide, Tiktok was locked in a room, where he was found much later by Dorothy Gale of Kansas.
Iron Giant 1907 "Is he not a great work of art?"Tiktok, describing the Iron GiantThe Iron Giant with the Hammer, like Tiktok, was constructed by Smith & Tinker at their factory in the town of Evna.
Non-Oz robots created by L. Frank Baum include:The Clockwork Man from Father Goose: His Book, 1899The Cast-Iron Man from A New Wonderland,1900Mr. Split from Dot and Tot of Merryland, 1901
To Burke, Byron & Lord Eglinton • chivalry was a noble ideal about how soldiers should behave in battle and life, rather than a specific code that helped protect a feudal class in the Late Middle Ages. Writers continued to think of chivalry as a military ideal through World War I, when wartime posters used images of medieval knighthood to portray war as something noble.
But after the horrors of World War I • the notion of “chivalry” lost its luster as returning soldiers became disillusioned with the idea that there can be any glory in war.
