Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature (Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions)

This volume addresses the place of the emotions in literary representations of war across six centuries of European history. It challenges modern assumptions about the passions and feelings attending violent conflict in order to reveal the multifarious historical emotions and emotional histories of war. Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction — War as Emotion: Cultural Fields of Conflict and Feeling....Pages 1-23 Emotional Responses to Medieval Warfare in the History of William Marshal....Pages 24-41 ‘Blisse wes on londe’: The Feeling of Peace in LaƷamon’s Brut....Pages 42-59 ‘Je Hé Guerre, Point Ne La Doy Prisier’: Peace and the Emotions of War in the Prison Poetry of Charles d’Orléans....Pages 60-76 ‘He In Salte Teres Dreynte’: Understanding Troilus’s Tears....Pages 77-97 Human Prudence versus the Emotion of the Cosmos: War, Deliberation and Destruction in the Late Medieval Statian Tradition....Pages 98-116 Moving to War: Rhetoric and Emotion in William Worcester’s Boke of Noblesse....Pages 117-132 ‘I Was Enforced to Become an Eyed Witnes’: Documenting War in Medieval and Early Modern Literature....Pages 133-151 ‘Man Is a Battlefield within Himself’: Arms and the Affections in the Counsel of More, Erasmus, Vives, and Their Circle....Pages 152-168 Grief and Glory: The Commemoration of War in Seventeenth-Century England....Pages 169-184 Remembering Civil War in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’....Pages 185-202 ‘Terrible Delight’: Art, Violence, and Power in Early Eighteenth-Century War Poems....Pages 203-217 ‘In Brazen Bonds’: The Warring Landscapes of North Carolina, 1775....Pages 218-234 The Grievable Life of the War-Correspondent: The Experience of War in Henry Crabb Robinson’s Letters to The Times, 1808–1809....Pages 235-250 Afterword: Locating Emotions, Locating Wars....Pages 251-259 Back Matter....Pages 260-274 Literature records, remembers, and recreates war and war's emotions in many forms: whether narrated by an eye-witness, an observer at distance, or one who contemplates conflict in the past, war is remembered through a wide range of literary texts, from narrative poems to personal letters and tomb inscriptions. The essays collected here explore the emotions of war in texts from the Middle Ages to the era of Romanticism, and in forms ranging from medieval chivalric biography to war correspondence in The Times. Brought together in this way, they show the impact of actual war experience on the literary production of emotions in the medieval and early modern periods. They illustrate how emotional life itself was - and continues to be - conceived and structured as part of human identity during wartime, in culturally and historically specific ways. By rejecting modern assumptions about the emotions of conflict, Emotions and War reveals the multifarious and discontinuous nature of historical emotions and emotional histories of wars past