'A Great Effusion of Blood': Interpreting Medieval Violence (review)

The topic of violence in historical contexts is gaining momentum among historians of medieval Europe. The choice of the title quotation 'a great effusion of blood' explicitly points to the direction taken in this collection of articles. As the editors explain in their introduction, the essays are concerned with the meanings of interpersonal or intragroup violence, often referred to in medieval sources as an 'effusion of blood'. These essays represent a trend among medieval historians to investigate not only the historicity of specific violent acts but also the representation of this violence within literary and historical narratives. The editors gesture towards the seminal work of Norbert Elias who famously characterized the medieval period as one of irrational violence from which he argued European society had developed through 'a civilizing process' to become less violent. Research into medieval violence, as demonstrated by the essays in this volume, has deepened historical understanding of the meanings and uses of violence in medieval societies, demonstrating that violence was not irrational, as Elias thought, but operated within culturally specific rules and understandings.

The essays here are grouped into two broad categories – 'Violence and identity formation' and 'Violence and the testament of the body'. Within the first group are six essays covering diverse territory. There are two essays on contemporary descriptions of violent events – Eve Salisbury on John Gower's description of the uprising of 1381 in Vox clamantis and Anne McKim's examination of chroniclers' descriptions of violence in Scottish wars. These take different approaches, with Salisbury analyzing how Gower situates the murder of Wat Tyler and the massacre of the Flemings in London as sacrificial violence and McKim examining how the meanings of violent acts against non-combatants in war change depending on the lens of the viewer, when 'One writer's hero can be another's villain and vice-versa' (p. 140). John Hill's essay is the only one in this section to examine a purely literary text with his analysis of how violence is used in the development of the character of Wiglaf in Beowulf. Hill argues that the violence that is attributed to Wiglaf elevates him into a new nobility and ushers him towards kinship with Beowulf, allowing him to be Beowulf's 'intellectual as well as military heir' (p. 30).

Debra Blumenthal and Mark Meyerson both explore criminal records from Valencia to carry the investigation of violence away from literary imagination into the depths of the legal narratives. Blumenthal analyzes cases where slaves are accused of committing violent acts on behalf of their masters. She argues among other things that, by using their slaves to conduct rivalries on their behalf, masters were wreaking dishonour on their enemies at the same time as ensuring that no blame attached to themselves. Meyerson examines one murder case for what it can reveal about honour and feuding between Jewish families. He argues that such violence was an essential part of the feud, not because these feuds were especially bloody, but because the real fear that they could escalate into bloodshed served as an inhibition to violence. Oren Falk in his essay on duelling in Icelandic sagas argues that bystanders contribute to the violence of the duel at each end of the event, both as instigators who fan the motivational flames necessary for the men to meet and fight and also as those who try and avert tragedy during or after the fight.

The second section of the book has three essays that analyze literary sources – Beth Crachiolo's analysis of gender in The South English Legendary, M. C. Bodden's essay on Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, and Richard Firth Green on the early Robin Hood Poems. Daniel Baraz's essay on differences between cultural perceptions of cruelty and violence raise interesting points about how descriptions of violent acts were used to create impressions of exceptional violence – or cruelty...