Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature eds. by Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, and Katrina O’Loughlin (review)

Compiled after the successful ‘“In Form of War”: Emotions and Warfare in Writing 1300–1820’ conference, held at The University of Western Australia in June 2014, this collection offers a refreshing perspective on the representation of emotional responses to war. Ranging chronologically from the early medieval period through to the early nineteenth century and utilising a wide range of primary source material and approaches, the contributions collectively develop the concepts of emotions in literature over a wide-ranging historical and geographical landscape.

One of the main strengths of this collection is the way each author has drawn out the appearance of emotional responses from within the literature, which is often rife with contradiction. In his essay on the poem ‘The History of William Marshall’, for example, Lindsay Diggelmann emphasises the emotional associations made to both war- and peace-time activities and their overlapping and contrasting emotional characteristics. Andrew Lynch and Stephanie Downes develop this further in their essays, which delve into the emotional responses to peace and incarceration. These are both considered opposites of active engagement in war, but they each have their own emotional associations with happiness and love. That these emotions are then often contradicted by longing and a need to engage in the politics of warfare is made clear by Lynch, in his examination of the Worcester poem Brut. Expanding upon the feelings of peace, for religious and political reasons, in the poem, Lynch also observes the conflicts that arise in association with the pre-existing emotions for seeking war and having military strength.

The wide range of emotional and circumstantial experiences war presents and the broad chronological span could have been problematic for the collection as a whole. However, it has been edited extremely effectively and with finesse, and overall themes have developed cohesively. The chronological arrangement of the essays also helps with this, as does the consistent cross-referencing of ideas and thematic approaches throughout. Among these are emotional representations in the literary tradition of courtly lyrics and the physical manifestations of emotions covered in Simon Meecham-Jones’s essay on Chaucer, the interpretation of the emotion-driven behaviours of Troilus, in Downes’s examination of Charles d’Orléans’ poetry, and the bodily and philosophical conditioning found in early humanist war politics explored by Andrew Hiscock.

Emotional reactions to the warfare arena come through in most essays, but particularly in Joanna Bellis’s exploration of medieval chronicles, and in Neil Ramsey’s highlighting of the importance of witnessing, reality, and grief in war correspondence. The emotional complexities of remembrance and commemoration are referred to continually, using both contemporary and modern examples, and several contributors attempt to draw upon our emotional reflections on present wars, or those being commemorated at present, to connect the work to a wider relevance. Downes, for instance, uses the example of a prisoner of war memorial erected in Ballarat in 2004, while Diana G. Barnes’s analysis of Andrew Marvell’s representations of the English Civil War is strengthened by the comparisons she draws with the post-First World War poetry of T. S. Eliot.

Contributors provide critical close readings of interesting source material. Each chapter usually focuses on a select work, generally poetry, letters, or specific authors. Impressive use has been made of this source material throughout, so that collectively the essays have drawn out a wide range of nuances, tropes, and emotional inflections. This reviewer found the habit of some of the contributors quoting large chunks of their source material and then expanding upon the quotations underneath something of an irritation, but this is of course a stylistic issue, that does not detract from the overall quality of the analysis.

Ultimately, this collection explores emotions and war, regardless of what emotions may be evoked or wars fought or not, in a successful and very...