Abstract
The word ‘emotion’, first used in France in the fifteenth century to denote political or social upheaval, was also commonly linked to physical violence. Nicole Hochner observes that in the 1429 Chronique du Bon duc Loys de Bourbon, ‘l’esmotion du duc de Bretaigne’ (the ‘emotion’ of the Duke of Brittany), leads directly to a siege of the French town of Troyes. The OED puts the earliest reference to ‘emotiones’ in English over a century later, in 1562, where it was also used to describe manifestations of social unrest: ‘the great tumultes and emotiones that were in Fraunce between the king and the nobilite.’1 During the reign of Elizabeth I the term entered English vocabulary in this triangulation of the French, Italian, and English languages as a description of — and an explanation for — escalating conflict, most frequently in historical accounts. Throughout history emotions have not just started wars, but been firmly entrenched within them, and are a heightened condition of their narrative aftermath. The history of emotions must necessarily therefore take this long written history of war and violent conflict into account.
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Notes
We are indebted to Philippa Maddern’s work on children’s experiences of emotion in late medieval and early modern England for these references. Both examples are cited in Philippa Maddern, ‘How Children Were Supposed to Feel; How Children Felt’, in Childhood and Emotion Across Cultures, 1450–1800, ed. Claudia Jarzebowski and Thomas Max Safley (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), 121–40, at 121.
Peter N. Stearns, American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (London: Routledge, 2006). See also Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1989); and American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994). With Carol Z. Stearns, see, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review, 90.4 (1985), 813–36.
Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel, trans. Anthony Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For another perspective on the impact of emotion on politics in the early nineteenth century, see Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); and ‘Emotion and Political Change’, in Doing Emotions History, ed. Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 163–83.
Ute Frevert, ‘Defining Emotions: Concepts and Debates over Three Centuries’, in Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000, ed. Ute Frevert et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–31, at 5.
William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
See Gerd Althoff, ‘Ira Regis: Prolegomena to a History of Royal Anger’ and Stephen D. White, ‘The Politics of Anger’, in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 59–74 and 127–52.
There are two significant exceptions: the recent War and Literature, ed. Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2014), which ranges chronologically from the twelfth to the twentieth century. A number of contributions consider various emotions of war and emotional genres of war writing, and the capacity of literary text to represent war’s emotions; for example, Susan A. Throop, ‘Acts of Vengeance, Acts of Love: Crusading Violence in the Twelfth Century’, 3–20, Katie L. Walter, ‘Peril Flight and the Sad Man: Medieval Theories of the Body in Battle’, 21–40, Joanna Bellis, ‘“The Reader myghte lamente”: The Sieges of Calais (1346) and Rouen (1418) in Chronicle, Poem and Play’, 84–106, Mary A. Favret, ‘A Feeling for Numbers: Representing the Scale of the War Dead’, 185–204, and Rachel Galvin, ‘The Guilt of the Noncombatant and W. H. Auden’s “Journal of an Airman”’, 205–27; and Kate McLoughlin, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), but its stated bias, in distinction from ours, is towards ‘the war representation … of twentieth-century Britain and America’, 20. For a synchronic study of literature and war in the Middle Ages, see Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, ed. Corinne Saunders, Françoise Le Saux, and Neil Thomas (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004). For perspectives on the eighteenth century, see Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), and Nicole Eustace’s Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Emotions in modern warfare are treated within studies by Stanley Rachman, Fear and Courage, 2nd edn (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1990) and Joanna Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety: Writing About Emotion in Modern History’, History Workshop Journal, 55 (2003): 111–33.
A notable exception is the recent work on modern manifestations of fear, especially after the events of 2001. Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005); Stearns, American Fear; Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier (eds), Fear: Across the Disciplines (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012).
Jan Plamper, ‘L’histoire des émotions’, À quoi pensent les historiens? Faire de l’histoire au xxie siècle, ed. Christophe Granger (Paris: Éditions Autremont, 2013), 225–40, at 231.
Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory, 51.2 (2012): 193–220, at 193.
See, in particular, the work of Barbara H. Rosenwein, in Emotional Communities and Anger’s Past, and in several essays, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review, 107 (2002): 821–45, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’, Passions in Context: Journal of the History and Philosophy of the Emotions, 1 (2010): 1–32, ‘Thinking Historically about Medieval Emotions’, History Compass, 8.8 (2010): 828–42, and ‘Theories of Change in the History of Emotions’, in A History of Emotions, 1200–1800, ed. Jonas Liliequist (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 7–20. See also the recent publication by William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and the introduction, by Stephanie Trigg, to a special issue of Exemplaria on ‘Premodern Emotions’, ‘Emotional Histories — Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory’, Exemplaria, 26.1 (2014): 3–15.
Favret, War at a Distance; David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
The epigraph to McLoughlin’s monograph is from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990): ‘If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and very terrible lie.’
See, for example: John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, 3 vols (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000–2004), Book 3, lines 2251–304 and Book 4, lines 1648–82; Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), lines 5020–439; Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of English Pacifist Ideas, 1340–1560 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 147–95: ‘Chapter 5, ‘Humanism, War and an Emerging Peace Ethic’; essays in this collection by James Simpson and Andrew Hiscock.
See, for example, Terry Jones, Chaucer’s Knight: Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London: Weidenfield, 1980); or, Richard Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): ‘the most compelling reason to avoid romanticizing chivalry is that taking a view through rose-coloured lenses distorts and essentially trivializes this extraordinarily powerful force in early European history’, 3.
Paul Zumthor, ‘Comments on H. R. Jauss’ Article’, New Literary History, 10.2 (1979): 367–76, at 370.
Sean McGlynn, ‘The Myths of Medieval Warfare’, History Today, 44.1 (1994): 28–34.
See Paul B. Newman, Daily Life in the Middle Ages (Jeffeson, NC: Mcfarland, 2001), 191–2.
Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1981); and Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Ute Frevert has written about ‘chivalry’ in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wars, as a gendered, emotional, motivational concept, closely linked with masculine ideals of honour, especially patriotic, and accusations of shame, especially that associated with deserters, those who refused to fight, and prisoners of war. See ‘Wartime Emotions’.
Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (London: Flamingo, 1988), 190–91. Cited in McLoughlin, Authoring War, 14.
Charles Dickens, A Child’s History of England, Vol 1: England from the Ancient Times to the Death of King John (London: Charles Bradbury and Evans, 1852), Chapter 1.
‘Hope ye so that I may ony whyle stonde a preved knyght?’ Malory, Complete Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), Book VII, Chapter 5, at 181, line 25.
John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (London: Pimlico, 1991), 18.
See Etienne Smoes, Le Courage chez les Grecs, d’Homère à Aristote (Brussels: Ousia, 1995), 70–71. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Books II–IV, ed. and trans. C. C. W. Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), Book II.2.
Vegetius, Epitome of Military Discipline, ed. and trans. N. P. Milner (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1996), 3.
See Jane Grogan, Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in The Faerie Queene (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 137–76.
For a recent attempt to reconstruct ‘a woman’s perspective on war’ in the later Middle Ages, see Angus J. Kennedy, ‘Christine de Pizan’s Epistre à la reine: A Woman’s Perspective on War and Peace?’ in War and Peace: Critical Issues in European Societies and Literature, 800–1800, ed. Albrecht Classen and Nadia Margolis, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 8 (Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 395–424.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess, lines 410–12, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Foules, line 682, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
M. S. Blayney (ed.), Fifteenth-Century English Translations of Alain Chartier’s Le Traité de l’Esperance and Le Quadrilogue Invectif. EETS os 270, 281. 2 vols. (1974, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), vol. 1, 146.
For the portentous role of landscape and atmosphere in the wars of the late eighteenth century see Mary Favret’s ‘War in the Air’, MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 65.4 (2004): 531–59.
John Urry, ‘The Place of Emotions within Place’, in Emotional Geographies, ed. Joyce Davidson, Mick Smith, and Liz Bondi (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 77–83.
‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, Andrew Marvell. The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 55, line 10.
The Works of John Dryden. Poems, Vol. 5. The Works of Virgil in English, ed. William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Georgics, Book 1.
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 305.
David Vessey, Statius and the Thebaid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 157–58.
Michael S. Foley, Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 23.
Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle: A Critical Edition of BnF MS. Fr. 25458, Charles d’Orléans’s Personal Manuscript, ed. John Fox and Mary-Jo Arn (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 258–59.
Rikke Schubart, ‘Introduction’, War Isn’t Hell, It’s Entertainment: Essays on Visual Media and the Representation of Conflict, eds. Rikke Schubart, Fabian Virchow, Debra White-Stanley and Tanja Thomas (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009), 4.
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© 2015 Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, and Katrina O’Loughlin
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Downes, S., Lynch, A., O’Loughlin, K. (2015). Introduction — War as Emotion: Cultural Fields of Conflict and Feeling. In: Downes, S., Lynch, A., O’Loughlin, K. (eds) Emotions and War. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374073_1
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