Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The De re militari of Vegetius in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
- Heroes of War: Ambroise's Heroes of the Third Crusade
- Warfare in the Works of Rudolf von Ems
- Chronicling the Hundred Years War in Burgundy and France in the Fifteenth Century
- War and Knighthood in Christine de Pizan's Livre des faits d'armes et de chevallerie
- Barbour's Bruce: Compilation in Retrospect
- ‘Peace is good after war’: The Narrative Seasons of English Arthurian Tradition
- The Invisible Siege – The Depiction of Warfare in the Poetry of Chaucer
- Warfare and Combat in Le Morte Darthur
- Women and Warfare in Medieval English Writing
- Speaking for the Victim
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The De re militari of Vegetius in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
- Heroes of War: Ambroise's Heroes of the Third Crusade
- Warfare in the Works of Rudolf von Ems
- Chronicling the Hundred Years War in Burgundy and France in the Fifteenth Century
- War and Knighthood in Christine de Pizan's Livre des faits d'armes et de chevallerie
- Barbour's Bruce: Compilation in Retrospect
- ‘Peace is good after war’: The Narrative Seasons of English Arthurian Tradition
- The Invisible Siege – The Depiction of Warfare in the Poetry of Chaucer
- Warfare and Combat in Le Morte Darthur
- Women and Warfare in Medieval English Writing
- Speaking for the Victim
- Index
Summary
And never syns was there seyne a more dolefuller batayle in no Crysten londe; for there was but russhynge and rydynge, foynynge and strykynge, and many a grym worde was there spokyn of aythir to othir, and many a dedely stroke …
And thus they fought all the longe day, and never stynted tylle the noble knyghtes were layde to the colde erthe. And ever they fought stylle tylle it was nere nyght, and by than was there an hondred thousand leyde dede uppon the erthe.
(Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur)But the past is just the same – and War's a bloody game …
Have you forgotten yet? …
Look down and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.
(Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Aftermath’)MALORY WROTE his Morte Darthur in prison, while the dynastic civil wars of York and Lancaster, the so-called ‘Wars of the Roses’, surged around him; his charge and imprisonment may have been the direct result of that political turbulence, and his involvement with Yorkist politics. Small wonder that in Malory's great Arthurian history he could so evocatively and so realistically depict the last battle of Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. His Morte Darthur engages directly with the problems of his own society, of an unstable kingdom, of feuds between knights, resulting in dissent among the people and civil war. For Malory, war is indeed a ‘bloody game’: devastating, yet also, in its relation to chivalry, its manifestation in single combats, jousting and tournaments, a fundamental, even desirable, aspect of life and society.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Writing WarMedieval Literary Responses to Warfare, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004