Reading and War in Fifteenth-Century England: From Lydgate to Malory by Catherine Nall (review)

Catherine Nall in her Introduction writes that ‘while writers such as Lydgate and Malory have not wanted for readers in modern times, we have perhaps failed to recognize just how far these canonical texts were shaped—in structure, language and meaning—by the military-inflected reading culture of the period’ (p. 10). The emergence and production of this culture, attributable to the dynamism of Henry V and his foreign policy, to the subsequent civil wars, and to the canon of militaristic and chivalric literature which was these writers’ inheritance, is the subject of Nall’s ambitious and engaging study.

Accordingly, the first chapter, ‘Reading Vegetius in Fifteenth-Century England,’ is devoted to the reception and transmission of De re militari. This chapter also initiates the vigorous exposition of texts and manuscripts, and their reception, that characterizes Nall’s reading. In her account of Vegetius manuscripts circulating in Latin, French, and English, Nall notes not only evidence of ownership but also evidence of use in the form of inscriptions and marginal notes. Not only different translations, but various manuscripts, are compared in detail. This chapter is also a fascinating contribution to the discussion of fifteenth-century translation generally.

Chapter Two, ‘Reading and War in the Aftermath of Defeat,’ argues that translations of De re militari were made necessary ‘not by success in warfare, but by failed military endeavor’ (p. 49). First translated into English about 1408, Vegetius was not in great demand until the mid-century loss of English territories in France: ten of the eleven manuscripts of the English prose Vegetius were produced between ca. 1445–1485; the redactor of Vegetius into the verse Knighthode and Bataile was active in the 1460s. These defeats were caused by non-payment of soldiers’ wages, and those soldiers’ concomitant pillaging and terrorizing areas gained in war, not through lack of might or right. Nall is persuasive, but this chapter might helpfully have included a section on the mystery of how medieval armies were supposed to be paid; if looting wasn’t sustainable, nor was expecting the Duke of York to pay soldiers from his own pocket.

Chapter Three, ‘Making War: The Martial Endeavours of John Lydgate and Henry V,’ happily goes beyond whether or not the poet supported the king’s policies. Its three-part presentation suggests, first, that the Troy Book charts a dialectic between the public rhetoric of war and Lydgate’s own staging of related episodes in the Troy narrative; second, that Lydgate was sedulous to address, in a Vegetius-like way, the logistics of war-making in his Siege of Thebes; and, third, the poet demonstrated special concern for the twin necessities, again, of controlling and paying the troops. Lydgate, as this substantial chapter shows, was a highly alert war-time poet.

In Chapter Four, ‘Sacralising Warfare in Knyghthode and Bataile,’ that text is reintroduced for well-deserved treatment as an overlooked masterpiece of translation and adaptation. This fierce poem, composed in crisp rime royal by a ‘person of Caleys’ (p. 129), preaches the Lancastrian cause as a kind of crusade; the Yorkists, accordingly, are all heretics and miscreants; and the idea of spiritual warfare is systematically translated back into literal—but still holy—carnage. For all its intended violence, this poem, with its joyous pace and unrelenting aureate diction, is full of poetic energy and strange charm and itself ‘in gemmy gold goth ardent, every cooste’ (p. 121). By Nall’s exposition, it should win for itself many new readers.

Chapter Five, ‘Malory’s Morte Darthur and the Rhetoric of War’ examines Malory’s making the Roman War the second tale in his book, rather than—as was the tradition—the ultimate one. Malory, it is argued, crafted a sequence in which—contrary to the traditional lesson—royal absence for war-making purposes does not encourage strife at home, but rather promotes unity; not foreign campaigning, but idle...