Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854

A History of Emotions

Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, Katrina O'Loughlin, Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, Katrina O’Loughlin, Katrina O'Loughlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138219168
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429821110
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854: A History of Emotions brings together leading scholars in medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century, and Romantic studies. The assembled essays trace continuities and changes in the emotional register of war, as it has been mediated by the written record over six centuries.

Through its wide selection of sites of utterance, genres of writing and contexts of publication and reception, Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854 analyses the emotional history of war in relation to both the changing nature of conflicts and the changing creative modes in which they have been arrayed and experienced. Each chapter explores how different forms of writing defines war – whether as political violence, civilian suffering, or a theatre of heroism or barbarism – giving war shape and meaning, often retrospectively. The volume is especially interested in how the written production of war as emotional experience occurs within a wider historical range of cultural and social practices.

Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854: A History of Emotions will be of interest to students of the history of emotions, the history of pre-modern war and war literature.

1
‘IN FORM OF WAR’

War and emotional formation in European history

Stephanie Downes and Andrew Lynch

I. ‘In form of war’

The phrase ‘arrayed in form of war’ is frequently found in late medieval English official and legal documents to introduce descriptions of the ‘array’ – the armour, weapons and organisation – of certain bands of male individuals (Paston 2004, p. 78). As a written formula, ‘arrayed in form of war’ is both technical and emotive, designed to place such men in maximum trouble with the law and to brand them as socially intolerable. The phrase encapsulates a central theme of this volume: that the emotions of war are ‘arrayed’ (that is, dressed and prepared) for use through complex negotiations between the two historical ‘forms’ of war and of writing. By reading form across both organised conflict and its textual representation, our goal is to broaden understandings of the social conditioning of human emotions in connection with war, throughout history. Feeling, too, takes forms – shared vocabularies, attitudes and gestures – which have a powerful impact on the way in which war in general, and individual wars in particular, garner meaning. The essays assembled here consider all writing(s) relating to war as ‘genres’ available for analysis and interpretation, from poetry and biography to tomb inscription. In placing the textual forms of war from various historical periods side by side our object is to identify both how the ways of writing war’s emotions have shifted over time and how they have sometimes stubbornly refused change.

In covering a broad time-span, stretching from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, we are not looking to write an overarching historical narrative in which uniform paradigm shifts in war’s emotional experience will be evident. Rather, the chronological organisation of the volume highlights the varied expressive challenges and opportunities presented by new modes and technologies in both war and textual production. The volume asks: what are the variations, new ventures and recurrences in the ‘emotional regimes’ of war that result from these formal shifts? The essays it contains explore how different forms of writing define war – whether as political violence, civilian suffering, or a theatre of heroism or barbarism – giving war shape and meaning, often retrospectively.

War itself is a highly variable and historically contingent business. In insisting on war as a set of changing historical, cultural and literary forms, we wish to escape unitary and universalist notions of its emotional register – a sense of what war ‘feels like’, either in general, or in any given place or time – while still honouring the relation of its formal attributes to lived actualities of feeling. Such an approach understands cultural concepts of emotions and their location within human identity as deeply related to participation in textual culture. Monique Scheer has argued, for example, that the formation of an ‘inner’ emotional life in German bourgeois culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries achieved its definition largely through the creation and consumption of written media: encyclopedias, diaries, ‘intense epistolary exchanges’, novels, and religious and philosophical discourse. Stuart Sherman makes a similar case for English culture in the early modern period (Sherman 1996). Scheer notes the decline of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in German definitions of emotion after 1840, but tracks a specific resurgence after the Second World War of ‘interiority’ as the place of the ‘true self’, allowing ‘a refuge’ and ‘a return to ‘inner values’ as a reaction to the experience of dictatorship and war. She then goes on to chart the subsequent displacement of this view by behaviourist models of the emotions that redirected attention to the physical body as the site of ‘real’ emotional experience (Scheer 2014, pp. 35–39). For a while, historical trauma produced a resurgence of the idea and value of emotional interiority, and reframed the emotional life of a nation on an earlier model, which had developed in written and sociable form in an earlier period.

Scheer’s study demonstrates that participation in written culture structures and informs the performance of emotional repertoires, but always within particular historical contexts. In this volume, and for this reason, we are especially attuned to war’s emotions as historical experiences whose production is bound up in a wide range of bodily and cultural practices – including the forms of writing themselves. As Scheer elaborates in her discussion of how Bourdieu’s habitus relates to the study of past emotions, bodily repertoires – including writing – are an intrinsic part of emotion’s forms:

[t]he formulation of thought is different when one is moving a pen across paper or typing on a keyboard as opposed to when one is speaking. Writing for oneself, as in a diary, while sitting alone has interiorizing effects, whereas speaking out loud while in view of a dialogic partner has exteriorizing ones. The social relationship of the two speakers affects the bodily dimension of the emotion in tone of voice, heart rate, and facial expression, which are all guided by the practical sense of the habitus, somewhere between deliberate control and unconscious habit.

(Scheer 2012, p. 212)

Aspects of this idea of the formal repertoires of emotion, ‘somewhere between deliberate control and unconscious habit’, were adopted by Jan Plamper in his study of Bolshevik children’s literature produced and consumed in times of war. Plamper suggests that, in certain conditions, reading can affect an ‘emotional socialization’ specifically related to war: ‘less intentional, less signified, and less conscious aspects of the reading experience’, ‘get stored as practical knowledge that is also simultaneously cognitive and corporeal’, and this ‘can be recalled … in different circumstances, including those of warfare’ (Plamper 2014, p. 205). Catherine Nall identifies a similar process but in an earlier period, arguing that for the later medieval English ruling class, reading and the conduct of war were inseparable activities. In her view, there is a dynamic, ‘circular’ interaction between ‘acts of textual production and reception, and the specific political and military circumstances in which they occurred’ (Nall 2012, p. 2). Whether the process of emotional formation described by Plamper and Nall occurs through reading in general, or through reading about war in particular – whether it is understood as conscious or unconscious, and whatever the theoretical balance struck between the corporeal and cognitive elements of reading – both Plamper’s and Nall’s claims avowedly depend, in their different ways, on a thoroughly situated and historicised analysis of the texts and acts concerned.

Such historical analyses demand an awareness of the formal and aesthetic communicative potential that texts offer their contemporary readerships, as well as the evidence for readerly engagements with them. Writing War seeks to explore that awareness with greater historical depth. Through its wide selection of sites of utterance, written and theatrical genres, and contexts of publication and reception, the collection elaborates the emotional forms of wars past, both in relation to the nature of individual historical conflicts, and to the changing creative modes in which they have been ‘arrayed’ and experienced since.

II. War, history and writing

As Kate McLoughlin points out in her introduction to the Cambridge Companion to War Writing, war has been remembered in words so often throughout history that even certain literary forms have become synonymous with individual conflicts; the First World War’s affinity with English lyric, for example, or the close connection of the ‘war on terror’ with the digital archive (McLoughlin 2009, p. 1). Some of these generic textual associations have great historical depth: for example, the Hundred Years’ War, waged by the English and French crowns between 1337 and 1453, which is well remembered in its lyric forms and cross-Channel literary exchanges (Butterfield 2009; Strakhov 2014; Bellis 2016). The seventeenth-century civil wars in Britain take shape for us in a Georgic immersion in landscape. Understandings of frontier colonial violence from the early modern period are so often deflected through the literary-affective register of pastoralism. Observing that certain conflicts possess a characteristic ‘poesis’ usually requires a certain amount of distance – whether physical or temporal – from the conflict itself (McLoughlin 2009, p. 2). Of course, war and writing can unfold simultaneously, but the backward glance of history becomes crucial in evaluating how war, especially an individual war, will be culturally and socially remembered.

It is the trans-temporal potential of this poesis and its relationship to Western representations of emotional experience in and after wartime that this collection aims to explore in greater depth, with particular reference to England, France and Scotland from the Middle Ages through to the earlier nineteenth century. A 2015 publication, Emotion, Politics and War, edited by Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory, addresses its subject matter in a post-2001 setting, drawing on research by an international selection of social and political scientists and cultural theorists to emphasise the ways in which the study of emotion in warfare has been minimised or overlooked. ‘Emotions,’ Neta C. Crawford (2015, p. xviii) insists in her Preface, ‘are constitutive of war and politics’. The volume pays close attention to the emotional resonances of war’s past and present in the twenty-first century: it opens with a reflection on the emotional meanings demonstrated in the First World War commemorations of 2014 (Gregory & Åhäll 2015, p. 1); while an early chapter by Brian Massumi (2015, p. 17), reprinted from a 2013 multimedia project on ‘Histories of Violence’, looks back to 11 September 2001, to ask of the political, social and affective present, ‘What remains of that day?’¹ Together, the volume’s contributors consider the roles that various texts play in preserving the emotions of war, from letters and memoirs at the beginning of the previous century, to emails and online media, demonstrating the centrality of writing to war’s emotions, even in the digital age. The collection’s primary emphasis, however, remains on the emotional and literal politics of modern warfare and the various ways in which these are rendered intelligible in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Gregory & Åhäll 2015, p. 3).

Our volume seeks to understand and articulate this contingency of war, textual media and feeling over a much longer history. The following sections of the introduction focus on how works of literature from various historical periods are shaped by and in response to wars past, and how these literary-affective forms attempt to shape contemporary and future narratives of war. Our project is in no way constrained by this archive; here we seek to use the rich and varied example of literature in order to examine the role of writing and reading about war in war’s long affective past. In the category of ‘literature’ we recognise the wide variety of poetic, narrative, theatrical and social forms which war has and might assume through writing which demonstrates some awareness or self-consciousness of its own formal vocabulary and structures, and through the associated range of emotions which it might be said to express or provoke. Such texts offer rich case studies for the expression and interpretation of war’s emotions; but also case studies for war-writing in general. Is there an emotional or literary genre of war to be traced from the medieval period through the nineteenth century in the Western European tradition? What can we learn from literature about the history of the emotions of war?

III. War literature as emotional tradition

In medieval European literature, war was a central theme, closely linked with genres such as romance and epic. From Troy to Jerusalem, the locations of past wars and the emotions they produced and that had produced them were vividly imaged. Writers often adapted classical narrative traditions as commentary on current conditions of national and civil conflict, from the Crusades to the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses. Medieval literature absorbed the culture of warfare, and metaphors drawn from the experience of war sustain some of the most famous and popular literary texts of the day, such as the siege of the captured and imprisoned ‘Rose’ in the thirteenth-century bestseller, the Roman de la rose. Perhaps more surprisingly, medieval literature also directly influenced the way wars were fought: during the fifteenth century, the revival of practical interest in Vegetius’s late fourth-century treatise on the art and conduct of war, De re militari, meant that versions and adaptations were widely available in the vernacular and newly influential in these forms (Saunders 2009, pp. 84–85). Military manuals crossed temporal, geographical, linguistic and even political boundaries with ease. Christine de Pizan’s Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie (1410), which drew directly on Vegetius’s text, was extremely popular in England throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while Catalan writer Raymond Lull’s popular thirteenth-century text, Libre qui es de l’ordre de cavalleria (The Book of the Order of Chivalry), reached a wide readership in France throughout the later medieval period. Both works were translated into English and printed by William Caxton, England’s ‘first printer’, in the late fifteenth century. Many of these vernacular manuals had an extraordinary longevity, influencing not only the reality of war, but the production of literature exploring its effects. Shakespeare, for example, is reported to have drawn from such works in his representation of just war in Henry V (Pugliatti 2010), while in the late fourteenth century, the poet John Gower called London ‘newe Troye’, reflecting the contemporary fascination with classical narratives of war, conflict and civic destruction.

In other famous literary texts from the medieval and early modern periods, war was thematised at the same time as it was curiously absent from the text, or consciously fictionalised into meta-narratives of war. In a famous scene from Chaucer’s great love poem, Troilus and Criseyde (set during the Trojan war but with little reference to the conflict itself), Criseyde reads aloud from the story of the ‘Siege of Thebes’ with two of her ladies (Book 2, ll. 83–84).² Reading about war in times of war forms another kind of redaction of war into words: the words of one war are transposed onto the experience of another, shaping its experience and representation anew. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene more subtly recalls classical models of warfare and warriors in its representation of Elizabethan political rule and expansion. The later books of Spenser’s allegory (which includes moments of startlingly graphic violence throughout), offers readers a metaphorical reflection on Elizabeth’s colonisation of Ireland (Fogarty 1989; Lim 1995). In Cervantes’ roughly contemporaneous satirical novel, Don Quixote, the windmill-tilting protagonist draws on medieval chivalric rather than classical models in telling his own tales of war. Cervantes himself had first-hand experience of conflict as a soldier, having fought under Philip II in the Battle of Lepanto and various Spanish conflicts against the Turks. ‘None in his poverty is as poor as he,’ Don Quixote declares, ‘for he depends on his miserable pay which comes late or never or on whatever he can steal with his own hands at great risk to life and conscience’ (Cervantes 2005, p. 331). Don Quixote speaks here in the voice of a soldier, but his words recall the supplications of medieval poets to their patrons, suggesting the entanglement of literary form and soldiers’ experience. Writing during the Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), Cervantes glosses the use and abuse of earlier literatures...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 ‘In form of war’: war and emotional formation in European history
• 2 Confessing the emotions of war in the Late Middle Ages: Le livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut
• 3 Emotion and medieval ‘violence’: the Alliterative Morte Arthure and The Siege of Jerusalem
• 4 The Armagnac-Burgundian feud and the languages of anger
• 5 Violent compassion in late medieval writing
• 6 ‘Thus of War, a Paradox I write’: Thomas Dekker and a Londoner’s view of continental war and peace
• 7 Corresponding romances: Henri II and the last campaigns of the Italian Wars
• 8 Bellicose passions in Margaret Cavendish’s Playes (1662)
• 9 ‘At Newburn foord, where brave Scots past the Tine’: emotions, literature and the Battle of Newburn
• 10 ‘This humble monument of guiltless Blood’: the emotional landscape of Covenanter monuments
• 11 Paradoxes of form and chaos in the poetry of Waterloo
• 12 War and emotion in the age of Biedermeier: the United Service Journal and the military tale
• 13 ‘A possession for eternity’: Thomas De Quincey’s feeling for war
• Index