Writing War: Medieval Responses to Warfare
This volume of essay emerges from a wide-ranging interdisciplinary conference on ‘War: Medieval and Renaissance Responses’, held at the University of Durham in April, 2001. The editors have collected together papers from one particular strand on the writing of war, mostly written by literary scholars. It would appear that the book is aimed primarily at a similar audience, judging by an introduction that attempts to set the scene through a discussion of medieval warfare that will receive short shrift from any military historian. Nevertheless this does not undermine the importance of the book as a contribution to the growing debate over the relationship between literature and warfare during the middle ages. These essays generally offers useful examples of the influence of war on medieval culture, but also the more sophisticated ways in which literary texts can shed light on complex reactions to violence, chivalry and war amongst both the militarized classes and wider society.
The two most important essays appear at the beginning and end of the book. Christopher Allmand’s overview of the importance of Vegetius’ De re militari during the middle ages summarizes the fruits of his on-going research. He argues that this famous book primarily influenced clerical, educated audiences until the advent of vernacular translations in the late middle ages. He also suggests that the primary importance of the text was social: it emphasised that the role of the army was to protect political society, that the leader was essential for victory, and that the soldier should serve professionally and honourably. Coming from a completely different direction, Helen Cooper explores a little used genre of late medieval French writing, the pastourelle. These moral poems gave a voice to the peasants who were victims of war, though in truth the texts were not written by or even for the rural population. They paint a vivid picture of the horrors of war, particularly in the hands of as skilled a scholar as Cooper who ably links these texts to the historical context of war-torn France.
A number of articles in the collection argue that literature sheds important light on the debates about, and even opposition to, warfare in late medieval society. Thus Andrew Lynch examines the complex attitudes towards war and peace in the Arthurian narratives by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Layamon, the anonymous author of Alliterative Morte Arthure or Sir Thomas Malory. By examining the cycles of war and peace in these texts, he argues that the writers did not present warfare in polarized terms, either as natural and inevitable occurrence or as a horror that should be avoided all cost: rather these writers regarded military conflict as ‘an accountable and potentially culpable policy’, thereby encouraging readers to reflect on the costs of warfare without pushing a simplistic, pacificist agenda. K.S. Whetter offers a related discussion of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, arguing that the writer recognised the positive and negative consequences of warfare and violence, building the drama and tragedy of the text upon that fundamental tension.
Other writers in this collection offer less-nuanced insights into late medieval debates on war and peace. For example, Françoise Le Saux abandons common sense in arguing that Christine de Pizan, author of the early fifteenth-century Livre des faits d’armes et de chevallerie (The book of deeds of arms and of chivalry) was a ‘proto-pacifist’. It is certainly true, as Le Saux argues, that Pizan argued that the only justifiable and useful form of war was a clear-cut defensive campaign. Nevertheless, Le Saux does not recognise that Pizan was positioning herself firmly within an established and wide-ranging debate when she did this, nor that modern terminology like ‘pacifist’ is hardly appropriate in describing such a position. Is it more appropriate for Pizan’s contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, a writer who made almost no direct reference to warfare in his poetry as Simon Meecham-Jones notes. There has certainly been a great deal of debate about Chaucer’s reluctance to engage with such an important contemporary reality in his writings; some scholars have argued that this must be explained by purely literary factors, whilst others have represented Chaucer as a secret opponent of warfare and chivalry, silenced by his fear of the consequences of uttering such politically incorrect views. For Meecham-Jones, Chaucer was unable to accept the moral implications of buying into the rhetoric of aristocratic warfare, but could offer no alternatives and therefore was left to follow the path of ‘implicit and solitary resistance’. The historian may feel somewhat bemused, watching this debate amongst literary scholars that is curiously abstract from the realities of the both poet’s life and public debates about precisely these issues during the reign of Richard II.
Other articles focus on texts that were more willingly ‘complicit’ in the aristocratic view of warfare. William H. Jackson continues his work on the thirteenth-century vernacular chronicle of Rudolf von Ems, a work that was fundamentally informed by the social values of the military classes. Drawing upon her work in preparation of an edition of Ambroise’s account of the Third Crusade, Marianne Ailes provides an intriguing analysis of the ways in which the writer constructed the narrative in order to praise and highlight exemplary heroes such as Richard I, Andrew of Chauvigny, James of Avesnes and Aubery Clement. Thea Summerfield considers the image of Robert Bruce in John Barbour’s Liber de gestis quondam Robert de Brus, written around 1375 for Robert II of Scotland and his court. She explores Barbour’s presentation of the famous Scottish king’s military strategies and heroism, elevating the Bruce as a model for the current king.
Two essays bite off rather more than they can chew. Georges Le Brusque’s offers a disappointingly thin overview of fifteenth-century French and Burgundian chronicles of warfare and chivalry. Like Le Saux, Le Brusque wishes to impose anachronistic categories upon his sources, creating an artificial distinction between ‘clerical’ and ‘chivalric’ chroniclers, and indeed between ‘French’ and ‘Burgundian’, that does not stand up to close scrutiny. Moreover, the author cites from an impressive range of chronicles without ever exploring the textual relationships between specific sources, or indeed the wider range of polemical and official texts that may have contributed to, or shaped, the constructions of the stories that are recounted. In short, this is far too ambitious a piece.
A similar charge could be levelled against Corinne Saunders’ exploration of the relationship between women and warfare in medieval writing. She highlights many famous examples of texts from across the middle ages that represent females as inspirations for and witnesses to masculine chivalric heroism, voices of mercy and pity, victims of war and, rarely, protagonists. This is an topic of fundamental importance but in covering so much ground, this disappointing essay amounts to little more than an encyclopaedic trawl through significant examples, rarely relating such models to any historical reality or drawing any wider conclusions about gender, warfare and chivalry.
[Editor's note: for a table of contents, see Boydell's Page]