Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson, War and Literature (Claussen)

Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson (eds.)

War and Literature

(D.S. Brewer, 2014) 254pp.  $50.00

War and Literature

“War was the first subject of literature; at times, war has been its only subject.” (xi) With these words, the editors of this volume begin a wide-ranging and useful investigation of the relationship between martial and literary activities from the 12th century to the 20th. The articles assembled in this volume touch on a number of useful and interesting intersections between war and literature and challenge the reader to consider not only the issues peculiar to each author’s temporal and geographical subject, but the issues of war and literature as components of the human experience writ large. For medieval historians, several articles are immediately obvious in their relevance. Yet medievalists would be remiss to discount the value of early modern and modern treatments of these two large topics.

Susanna A. Throop’s article on crusading vengeance opens the volume with an examination of ideas of crusading expressed in literature. Throop’s argument rests on the idea that vengeance was an ideal expressed in both religious and secular texts. From a religious perspective, vengeance was a moral necessity for Christians to bring heretics, a term which included Muslims in medieval thinking, back to the love of God. In addition to the well-known vengeful God of the Old Testament, Throop demonstrates that the New Testament also laid the foundations for a loving Christian vengeance. The article speaks to the blending of secular and ecclesiastical thoughts on vengeance as European Christian warriors traveled across Europe and the Mediterranean to conquer. Throop’s argumentative gaze, trained on the eastern crusades, would likely be as valuable when applied to northern crusades, Iberian holy war, or wars against heretics in the heart of Europe. This article is a crucial contribution to the historiographies of crusade, of violence, and of medieval ideas.

Following Susanna Throop’s investigation of impulses for medieval warfare in literature is Katie L. Walter’s examination of literary preparations for warfare. Walter’s article aims to examine medieval theories of the body, of affect, and of emotional responses to war on the part of fighting men. Drawing on the literature of learned thinkers, Walter suggests that knights and men-at-arms needed to be saddened, that is inured to the horrors and challenges of vigorous fighting. No doubt, in a world where soldiers physically hacked and tore apart one another’s bodies, the question of preparing men emotionally for such challenges is essential and Walter’s article takes a bold first step into this field. The writers that Walter deals with dwelt on the potent emotion of fear, an emotion that was itself frightening to medieval warriors, and suggested practical and philosophical means to reduce fear. This article leaves the reader eager for more, perhaps for a dialogue between these philosophical tracts and the treatises and imaginative literature that knights themselves read and wrote. How do ideas of saddening fit with chivalric virtues such as Temperance or Mesure? Did chansons or romances serve a role that similarly prepared warriors for the battlefield through graphic descriptions of battle and fighting? Walter’s article is surely not the last we will hear on this topic.

Jumping ahead, we encounter Catherine A.M. Clarke’s article on the use of classical literature in 12th century England. Clarke argues that chroniclers of the English Anarchy drew on Lucan’s 1st century Bellum Civile as they described their own civil war, but that they did so on their own terms. Twelfth century chroniclers were not merely copycats, taking classical works and inserting them uncritically in their own. Instead, medieval historians adapted classical history to their own ends. Where Lucan, for example, adopted a nihilistic tone as he watched the world crumble, 12th century authors used his metaphors and phrases, but adopted an appropriately medieval moral interpretation of the events around them. Clarke’s analysis here speaks louder and wider than the Anarchy – her conclusions are worthwhile as medievalists consider the use of classical texts in medieval histories. This article is a solid reminder that medieval historians thought about the texts that they imitated and may well have rejected their original meaning even as they imitated or copied the originals’ tone and style.

The last article dealing with medieval history is Joanna Bellis’ assessment of the legacies of the sieges of Calais and Rouen through the 16th century. Bellis highlights the changing reputations of both Edward III and Henry V over the course of a century or so. Where Edward began with a reputation as a great and ruthless warrior king, Henry’s chroniclers had to tread cautiously with him as he attempted to assert his legitimacy as king. During the Tudor period, though, the roles had been reversed. Writers in the late 15th and 16th centuries were concerned with Edward’s treatment of noncombatants at Calais, worried that his ruthlessness reflected moral problems. Henry, on the other hand, had become a vaunted warrior, a hero of medieval England. The Tudors, seeking figures for their own legitimacy, found a much better model in Henry than in Edward. This study usefully offers a look at the way in which literature powerfully controlled the image of a warrior long after his death.

Other articles in this collection deserve a close reading by medievalists as well. Tom F. Wright’s comparative close reading of the works of Richard Caton Woodville and Herman Melville in the mid-19th century recommend to the historian of any period a methodology for understanding technological change and its relationship to literature. In a century that saw the development of penny-press newspapers and the electric telegraph, Wright argues that local communities still received their war news (about the Mexican-American War and the US Civil War) through oral and communal readings. In short, individuals and communities engaged the new technologies in fundamentally traditional ways; the technology of literature can be groundbreaking, but it is not always used as we imagine it always has been.

Other articles in the collection deal with the perpetual preparation for a hot Cold War in the 20th century United Kingdom, the intersection of metaphors for eating and metaphors for war in Shakespeare’s literary corpus, the experience of British loyalists during and after the American Revolution, a philosophical examination of the development of statistical representation of war dead, the guilt of the noncombatant writ large across 20th century British literature, and the towering, even unreachable status of Tolstoy’s War and Peace for war literature from the 19th century onwards. For the medieval military historian, this volume is not only useful, but critical. The articles on medieval history alone make it a worthwhile read and the articles on early modern and modern history remind us that breaking out of our comfortable periodization now and then improves our scholarly ability. For the academic historian and the classroom instructor, War and Literature recommends itself as a volume on two widely significant aspects of human history.

Samuel A. Claussen
University of Rochester
[email protected]

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