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Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Debora Shuger
Debora Shuger*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

Et virum bonum quom laudabant, ita laudabant, bonum agricolam bonumque colonum.

—Cato, De agri cultura

In 1578 Hubert Languet wrote to his young protegee Philip Sidney concerning the latter's plan to assist the Low Countries in their fight against Spain. Surprisingly, the old republican Calvinist monarchomach vetoed the idea, bluntly informing the impulsive teenager that “you and your fellows, I mean men of noble birth, consider that nothing brings you more honour than wholesale slaughter, and you are generally guilty of the greatest injustice.” This hostile assessment of the aristocratic warrior ethos — what Languet derides as “mere love of fame and honour and … displaying your courage” — bears witness to a major ideological upheaval of the early modern period: the attack on the aristocratic politics of violence and, to quote another Elizabethan, “glory got by courage of manhood.”

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 1997 , pp. 494 - 525
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1997

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