Overview

This collection assembles work by some of the foremost English-speaking scholars of pre-modern thought and culture and is the fruit of the Australian Research Council's ground-breaking Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion. The impact of war, a human activity that is both public and politically charged, is examined as it affects private human lives caught up in public and political situations. The essays, many of them influenced by the burgeoning field of study in the history of emotions, examine the often unconsidered effects of war—on the individual and on the commune—as revealed in the study of well-known texts such as Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, as well as other lesser-known works that mirror the concerns of the society in which they were conceived. These latter range from the twelfth-century chansons of the Crusades, through the fifteenth-century French and English political works of Alain Chartier, to the twentieth-century anti-war satirical films of Mario Monicelli.

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9781641893084

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This is a fine collection of essays gathered to honor the academic career of Andrew Lynch, scholar of late medieval literature, warfare, and emotions. [...] Taken together, the essays provide fresh insights into the ways in which emotions are expressed in war. Grief, love, and courage are shown to be entangled in complex ways. All the essays explore the ways in which these emotions were both expressed and represented—implicitly then, the relationship between subjective experience, articulation, and representation becomes a rather interesting theme. Finally, memory plays a surprisingly key role throughout: memories of promises made before hostilities, memory in the form of trauma, even what White terms “proleptic nostalgia” (16)—the anticipation of memories about close fraternal bonds during battle. Through this emphasis on memory, war emerges not just as a series of cataclysmic moments, but an ongoing set of relationships and feelings which resonate across time. -- Hannah Skoda * Speculum 99, no. 1 (January 2024): 255-56 *

Author Information

Claire McIlroy is an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia and was an active member of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Anne M. Scott is an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia, and has published widely on Middle English literature.

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