Representing War and Violence, 1250–1600 ed. by Joanna Bellis and Laura Slater (review)

Medievalists have a seemingly unlimited fascination with war and violence. Even as we are often obliged to challenge the popular view of our period as an age of constant bloodshed and casual brutality, many of us are drawn to these very themes. Yet despite the existence of a huge body of scholarship on medieval warfare, medievalists have only relatively recently begun to think seriously about the relationship between actual violence and its representations by medieval artists and writers. This fine collection of nine essays, beautifully edited and thought-provokingly framed by Joanna Bellis and Laura Slater, brings together work by historians, art historians, and literary scholars who probe the interstices between historical acts and cultures of violence and their recreations in verse, prose, and illumination. The contributions, which originated as papers presented at a 2013 gathering in Cambridge, are arranged into three thematic sections in such a way as to prompt readers to draw unexpected connections across disciplines, genres, and contexts.

The volume opens with a substantial introduction in which the editors highlight the ambiguities surrounding war and violence in later medieval Europe and note that the existence of multiple discourses of violence, especially martial violence, allowed authors and artists considerable interpretative leeway. Given that "war could connote something glorious, epic, just or noble; or something fallen, unchristian, hideous and brutalising" (p. 3), representations of historical conflicts tell us as much about interpreters' moral and political aims as they do about the events themselves, just as openly fictional accounts of warfare can be read as social commentary. Bellis and Slater reevaluate earlier readings of medieval violence as a normative, rational social discourse—readings that were themselves a rejection of Norbert Elias's characterization of medieval actors as irrational and uncivilized—and insist that while "violence could be represented as normative, even positive, by those whose interests it served," these very representations "were calculated ways of controlling and interpreting the violence that was simultaneously understood as destructive and chaotic" (p. 11).

The three essays in Part I, "The Ethics and Aesthetics of Depicting War and Violence," address textual and visual representations of warfare in narratives that are at least purportedly historical. Richard W. Kaeuper's "Medieval Warfare—Then and Now" encourages us to attend to the ways in which medieval commentators justified and valorized medieval violence through the discourse of chivalry, thereby transforming acts of gratuitous cruelty into heroic deeds of prowess. Those familiar with Kaeuper's seminal work on chivalry will be acquainted with his two main claims: first, that far from restraining knightly violence, "chivalric ideals actually made war more likely" (p. 27); and second, that chivalry shaped a distinctive knightly piety that linked martial prowess to penance and asceticism. Next, in a jewel of an essay, Christina Normore explores the challenge of "Depicting Defeat in the Grandes Chroniques de France" through a comparison of two dramatically different representations of the 1302 French defeat at Courtrai in manuscripts commissioned, respectively, for the French kings Charles V (r. 1364–1380) and Charles VI (r. 1380–1422). While the manuscripts contain identical textual accounts of the battle, their illuminators departed from this script in various ways. The illuminator of the earlier Grandes Chroniques manuscript, produced for Charles V in the mid-1360s, during the second stage of the Hundred Years War, anachronistically restaged the battle as a victory of disciplined French knights over Flemish infantry. In contrast, the artist who worked on Charles VI's manuscript in ca. 1382, the year French troops avenged their 1302 defeat by sacking Courtrai, created "a haunted vision of chaotic retreat" (p. 51), in which hulking Flemish troops slaughter the French knights as their leader, Robert of Artois, flees the field. In both these images, Normore suggests, the bodies of dead French knights were intended to serve as "sites for extended mourning" (p. 46) for fourteenth-century viewers. This section's last essay, Anne Baden-Daintree's...