Representing War and Violence, 1250-1600 - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783271558 ISBN 13: 9781783271559

Publisher: Boydell Press, 2016

Synopsis

War and violence took many forms in medieval and early modern Europe, from political and territorial conflict to judicial and social spectacle; from religious persecution and crusade to self-mortification and martyrdom; from comedic brutality to civil and domestic aggression. Various cultural frameworks conditioned both the acceptance of these forms of violence, and the protest that they met with: the elusive concept of chivalry, Christianity and just war theory, political ambition and the machinery of propaganda, literary genres and the expectations they generated and challenged. The essays here, from a variety of disciplines, explore how violence and conflict were documented, depicted, narrated and debated during this period. They consider manuals created for and addressed directly to kings and aristocratic patrons; romances whose affective treatments of violence invited profoundly empathetic, even troublingly pleasurable, responses; diaries and "autobiographies" compiled on the field and redacted for publication and self-promotion. The ethics and aesthetics of representation, as much as the violence being represented, emerge as a profound and constant theme for writers and artists grappling with this most fundamental and difficult topic of human experience.

About this title

About the Author:

Joanna Bellis is the Fitzjames Research Fellow in Old and Middle English at Merton College, Oxford; Laura Slater currently holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship from The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. Contributors: Anne Baden-Daintree, Anne Curry, David Grummitt, Richard W. Kaeuper, Andrew Lynch, Christina Normore, Laura Slater, Sara V. Torres, Matthew Woodcock,

Review:

Representing War and Violence is a valuable and enjoyable read. The editors are to be commended for bringing together such a variety of innovative material and for synthesizing these pieces in a clear and cohesive dialogue. They have provided an admirable model for future collections of interdisciplinary research across the field of medieval studies. LEFT HISTORY

About this edition

• Publisher: Boydell Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1783271558
• ISBN 13: 9781783271559
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 232
• Editor: Bellis Joanna, Slater Laura