Emotions and War ─ Medieval to Romantic Literature

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.

Prof. Andrew Lynch is the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, specializing in medieval and early modern literatures of war and peace. Drs Stephanie Downes and Katrina O'Loughlin are Research Associates in the history of emotions, specializing in literary texts written during the conflict of the Hundred Years War, and in eighteenth-century women's, travel, and civil war writing, respectively.