Literature, Emotions, and Pre-Modern War

This is a fine collection of essays gathered to honor the academic career of Andrew Lynch, scholar of late medieval literature, warfare, and emotions. [...]

Taken together, the essays provide fresh insights into the ways in which emotions are expressed in war. Grief, love, and courage are shown to be entangled in complex ways. All the essays explore the ways in which these emotions were both expressed and represented—implicitly then, the relationship between subjective experience, articulation, and representation becomes a rather interesting theme. Finally, memory plays a surprisingly key role throughout: memories of promises made before hostilities, memory in the form of trauma, even what White terms “proleptic nostalgia” (16)—the anticipation of memories about close fraternal bonds during battle. Through this emphasis on memory, war emerges not just as a series of cataclysmic moments, but an ongoing set of relationships and feelings which resonate across time.

~Hannah Skoda, Speculum 99, no. 1 (January 2024): 255-56