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Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854: A History of Emotions brings together leading schol... more Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854: A History of Emotions brings together leading scholars in medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century, and Romantic studies. The assembled essays trace continuities and changes in the emotional register of war, as it has been mediated by the written record over six centuries. Through its wide selection of sites of utterance, genres of writing and contexts of publication and reception, Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854 analyses the emotional history of war in relation to both the changing nature of conflicts and the changing creative modes in which they have been arrayed and experienced. Each chapter explores how different forms of writing defines war – whether as political violence, civilian suffering, or a theatre of heroism or barbarism – giving war shape and meaning, often retrospectively. The volume is especially interested in how the written production of war as emotional experience occurs within a wider historical range of cultural and social practices. Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854: A History of Emotions will be of interest to students of the history of emotions, the history of pre-modern war and war literature.

Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries

Andrew Lynch recuperates an overlooked aspect of Chaucerian reception in the nineteenth century: ... more Andrew Lynch recuperates an overlooked aspect of Chaucerian reception in the nineteenth century: Chaucer’s Catholicism. By the nineteenth century, to be Catholic meant to be un-English, even unpatriotic. Lynch reviews the different strategies employed by literary critics to dilute the idea of Chaucer as a Catholic believer. Chaucer’s Catholicism was subjected to processes of infantilisation in order to promote his status as the father of English poetry.

Journal of Irish Studies, 2001

<p>From the mid-eighteenth century onward, histories of England written for children became... more <p>From the mid-eighteenth century onward, histories of England written for children became a very popular literary genre, attempted by authors as various as Oliver Goldsmith, Jane Austen, William Godwin, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin and H. E. Marshall (<italic>Our Island Story</italic>, 1905). This chapter investigates how these histories typically represent the Middle Ages to children through themes of war, violence and religion, within a long-range view of the nation and empire slowly developing beyond archaism. Medieval war is sometimes depicted as barbaric, but also read as a sign of racial spirit. Medieval religion, especially monastic culture, receives a more generally hostile reaction. The medievalism of most writers – Ruskin is a telling exception – frames the period as a dark prelude to Reformation and the later growth of Great Britain through the assertion of regal and parliamentary power.</p>

Arthuriana, 2018

In its compressed and fast-moving form, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur creates a marked impression of ... more In its compressed and fast-moving form, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur creates a marked impression of emotional spontaneity, intensity, and suddenness. Poetic strategies of repetition, verbal collocation, and thematic connection create a volatile emotional environment in which joy and sorrow are registered as overpowering bodily and cognitive events. The poem's conduct both bears out the observation that medieval Arthurian romance is 'constructed upon the antithesis of reason and passion' and shows the precariousness of that distinction in its own practice. (AL)

Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children, 2004

Malory’s Le Morte Darthur is a book for adult readers, but one that most of them will already hav... more Malory’s Le Morte Darthur is a book for adult readers, but one that most of them will already have encountered in a version for children. This was not always the case. Before the mid-Victorian period, there was a juvenile Arthurian literature in the form of short histories, chapbook romances, ballads, Jack the Giant-Killer, and Tom Thumb, but it did not involve Malory, whom young people had to read straight or not at all. J. T. Knowles’s Story of King Arthur (1862) is usually seen as beginning adaptations of the Morte for young readers, a category which has since grown very large. Malory’s book remains today, as it was for Tennyson,1 a notable link between youth and age, still perhaps one of the few narratives that people might encounter in some form throughout their whole reading lives. But since the mid-nineteenth century there has been a troubled double apprehension of the Morte: that it is somehow particularly suitable for children yet can only be made so by strenuous adaptation. It has been a text both loved and feared, deeply entrusted and distrusted with cultural labor. Through our double compulsion to give the story to children yet to change it radically for that purpose, Malory sets a revealing test for each generation, each writer, who adapts and retells him.

A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age, 2019

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2016

Virginia Woolf praised Walter Scott as 'perhaps the last novelist to practise the great, the Shak... more Virginia Woolf praised Walter Scott as 'perhaps the last novelist to practise the great, the Shakespearean art, of making people reveal themselves in speech,' but she confined her praise to his Scots dialogue. Of the 'genteel' English speech of Scott's heroes and heroines she wrote: 'As well talk of the hearts of seagulls and the passions and intricacies of walking-sticks' (Woolf, [1816] 1924, 42). Scott's medievalist stories feature few or no Scots-speaking characters. Much of his middle ages is voiced in the polite English voices Woolf disdains. So are they merely the sound of walking-sticks and seagulls? Certainly, the difference class makes to Scott's language choices in giving voice to character appears in his medievalist novels. The mid-sixteenth-century Scottish noblemen and monks of The Monastery and The Abbot, for instance, most ahistorically all speak Standard English; the tenant farmer families speak Scots, except for those young people among them for whom a higher destiny awaits. Nevertheless, class is not the only relevant language consideration in Scott. In The Fair Maid of Perth, set around 1400, the guildsmen and burgesses of Perth speak very little Scots; they are 'translated' into an English that is made to stand for medieval common speech but sounds like some version of Early Modern dramatic dialogue: 'Out upon you, Henry, that you will speak so like a knave to one who knows thee so well!' (Scott, [1828] 1905, 38).

Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture, 2012

The Walt Disney animated Robin Hood (1973)1 has often been regarded by critics as unimpressive. T... more The Walt Disney animated Robin Hood (1973)1 has often been regarded by critics as unimpressive. The influential site Rotten Tomatoes rates it at 55 percent, the lowest among the twenty-six Disney animations released before 1987.2 Various reasons have been alleged for this supposed inferiority. The film has been seen as a small-budget effort made without enthusiasm by Disney’s senior staff after his death in 1966, without the master’s magic input: “You had a pride in the film you were making because he was there… and of course he wasn’t there anymore. There was a vast difference.”3 It was released in the middle of a period when the company’s attention had supposedly turned from animation to its live action films and theme parks. Only seven Disney animated features were made between 1960 and 1980, although there were three part-animated films, including the smash hit Mary Poppins (1964).

Shakespeare and Emotions, 2015

In the last scene of Measure for Measure comes a moment of great stress for Isabella, when the Du... more In the last scene of Measure for Measure comes a moment of great stress for Isabella, when the Duke affects not to believe her evidence on the grounds that she is mad. She says: Oh Prince, I conjure thee as thou believ’st There is another comfort than this world That thou neglect me not with that opinion That I am touched with madness: make not impossible That which but seems unlike. (5.1.48–51)1 ‘Conjure’ may have a special appropriateness here, meaning not merely to ‘appeal earnestly to’ someone (5.1.48.n), but ‘… [t]o entreat (a person to some action) by putting him upon his oath, or by appealing to something sacred’.2 Isabella, not officially under oath herself, reminds the Duke that as a Christian prince he is sworn to respect a higher power, and one whose ways are ‘other’ than this world’s. Specifically, she says, God gives another kind of ‘comfort’ (‘strength’, ‘happiness’ or ‘consolation’)3 from that in worldly understanding; what looks mad and impossible to ‘opinion’ here is seen differently in heaven.4

Australian Literary Studies, 2007

Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries

Journal of Irish Studies, 2001

Arthuriana, 2018

Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children, 2004

A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age, 2019

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2016

Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture, 2012

Shakespeare and Emotions, 2015

Australian Literary Studies, 2007

Literature records, remembers, and recreates war and war's emotions in many forms: whether narrat... more Literature records, remembers, and recreates war and war's emotions in many forms: whether narrated by an eye-witness, an observer at distance, or one who contemplates conflict in the past, war is remembered through a wide range of literary texts, from narrative poems to personal letters and tomb inscriptions. The essays collected here explore the emotions of war in texts from the Middle Ages to the era of Romanticism, and in forms ranging from medieval chivalric biography to war correspondence in The Times. Brought together in this way, they show the impact of actual war experience on the literary production of emotions in the medieval and early modern periods. They illustrate how emotional life itself was – and continues to be - conceived and structured as part of human identity during wartime, in culturally and historically specific ways. By rejecting modern assumptions about the emotions of conflict, Emotions and War reveals the multifarious and discontinuous nature of historical emotions and emotional histories of wars past.

Drawing on the latest scholarship from international researchers, this dedicated collection inves... more Drawing on the latest scholarship from international researchers, this dedicated collection investigates how medieval and early modern Europeans understood and articulated emotions.

This book investigates how medieval and early modern Europeans constructed, understood, and articulated emotions. The essays trace concurrent lines of influence that shaped post-Classical understandings of emotions through overlapping philosophical, rhetorical, and theological discourses. They show the effects of developments in genre and literary, aesthetic, and cognitive theories on depictions of psychological and embodied emotion in literature. They map the deeply embedded emotive content inherent in rituals, formal documents, daily conversation, communal practice, and cultural memory. The contributors focus on the mediation and interpretation of pre-modern emotional experience in cultural structures and institutions — customs, laws, courts, religious foundations — as well as in philosophical, literary, and aesthetic traditions.

This volume thus represents a conspectus of contemporary interpretative strategies, displaying close connections between disciplinary and interdisciplinary critical practices drawn from historical studies, literature, anthropology and archaeology, philosophy and theology, cognitive science, psychology, religious studies, and gender studies. The essays stretch from classical and indigenous cultures to the contemporary West, embracing numerous national and linguistic groups. They illuminate the complex potential of medieval and early modern emotions in situ, analysing their involvement in subjects as diverse as philosophical theories, imaginative and scholarly writing, concepts of individual and communal identity, social and political practices, and the manifold business of everyday life.

A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Late-medieval, Reformation and Renaissance Age (1300–1600). London: Bloomsbury., 2019

A Cultural History of the Emotions, Volumes 1-6. London: Bloomsbury, 2019

Across six volumes, A Cultural History of the Emotions explores how emotions have changed over th... more Across six volumes, A Cultural History of the Emotions explores how emotions have changed over the course of human history, but also how emotions have themselves created and changed history. Emotions underpin our everyday lives and shape our mental, physical and social well-being. This collection shows how emotions can offer a unique insight into the historical thought and function of different societies.

Each volume in the series encompasses interdisciplinary work on the emotions, covering the medical, scientific, religious and intellectual history, how they have been performed and represented and how they were enacted in social practices on both a personal and public level. The same eight themes are addressed in all six volumes:

1. Medical and Scientific Understandings
2. Religion and Spirituality
3. Music and Dance
4. Drama
5. The Visual Arts
6. Literature
7. In Private: The Individual and the Domestic Community
8. In Public: Collectivities and Polities

Through its wide selection of sites of utterance, genres of writing and contexts of publication and reception, Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854 analyses the emotional history of war in relation to both the changing nature of conflicts and the changing creative modes in which they have been arrayed and experienced. Each chapter explores how different forms of writing defines war – whether as political violence, civilian suffering, or a theatre of heroism or barbarism – giving war shape and meaning, often retrospectively. The volume is especially interested in how the written production of war as emotional experience occurs within a wider historical range of cultural and social practices.

Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854: A History of Emotions will be of interest to students of the history of emotions, the history of pre-modern war and war literature.

Medievalism––the reception and imaginative recreation of the Middle Ages in modernity––has had a... more Medievalism––the reception and imaginative recreation of the Middle Ages in modernity––has had a surprisingly vital presence in popular representations of international and global culture. Earlier accounts of medievalism emphasised its emergence out of European nationalist agendas. By contrast, contemporary medievalist studies are turning increasingly to the examination of cultural practices in which geographical, cultural and historical demarcations are brought into question. Medievalism is now recognized as a rich and expanding domain in which historical epochs are co-present and national cultures are problematized, sometimes even as they are invoked. The “popular Middle Ages” has traveled a long way from its nationalistic origins, entering a realm where “national”, “postcolonial”, “transnational”, “international, and “global” all become terms that require as much revisitation and renegotiation as that most slippery of all terms, “the medieval”. In the realm of popular culture, the international profile of medievalism refers not only to the global consumption of the medieval past in the postmedieval present, but also, in many cases, to how the Middle Ages themselves are represented in many popular cultural forms.

Traversing this transhistoric and crosscultural domain, International Medievalism and Popular Culture presents current considerations of multitemporality with new articulations of how medievalism participates in and expresses a range of international perspectives. In doing so, this study also traces the cultural dynamics of medievalism as it has appeared in various colonial environments, and it analyzes the hybrid forms even apparently nationalist medievalism has taken when transplanted into non-European soil. It engages with a medievalism that is “popular” not only in the sense of garnering a wide international audience, but as emerging within mass commodity culture and the contemporary global mediasphere.

Today medievalism is increasingly intelligible as a cultural lingua franca, produced in trans- and international contexts with a view to reaching popular international audiences, some of mass scope. This book offers new perspectives on international relations and how global concerns are made available through contemporary medievalist texts. It questions how research in medievalism may help us rethink the terms of internationalism and globalism within popular cultures, ideologies, and political formations. It investigates how the diverse media of medievalism (print; film and television; arts and crafts; fashion; digital media; clubs and fandom) affect its cultural meaning and circulation, and its social function, and engage questions of desire, gender and identity construction.

As a whole, International Medievalism and Popular Culture differs from those studies which have concentrated on imaginative appropriations of the middle ages for domestic cultural contexts. It investigates rather how contemporary cultures engage with medievalism to map and model ideas of the international, the trans-national, the cosmopolitan and the global. This book includes examples from Europe, Britain, North America, Australia and the Arab world. It discusses the formation and the impact of popular medievalism in the globalised worlds of Braveheart, Disney and Harry Potter, but it also explores how the contemporary medieval imaginary generates international cultural perspectives, for example in considering Middle Eastern reception of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, the Byzantinism of Julia Kristeva, and Hedley Bull’s postnationalist ‘new medievalism’.