take up the gauntlet

• take up the gantlet

See throw down the gauntlet.

take up the gauntlet

1. (idiomatic) To accept a challenge.

   He doesn't read Greek, but he took up the gauntlet and did his best to understand the letter, anyway.

   • 1989, H. T. Willetts (translator), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (author), August 1914, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, page 99:

     It was they, the ones without rights or positions, who had taken up the Emperor Wilhelm's gauntlet.