Stephanie Downes

‘Je Hé Guerre, Point Ne La Doy Prisier’: Peace and the Emotions of War in the Prison Poetry of Charles d’Orléans

The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat, Victoria, was opened in 2004 to commemorate more than 36,000 Australian prisoners taken during the Boer War, First and Second World Wars, and the Korean War. Its design included an inscribed granite slab and a pool of water in acknowledgement of ‘the pain and suffering of those that returned and those that remain on foreign shores’ and to remember ‘those men and women who, while captured, suffered appalling hardship and horrendous atrocities but maintained their dignity, courage and mateship’.1 In the later medieval period that this essay considers, the experience of those captured in conflict was less likely to reach the levels of human suffering recalled at the Ballarat memorial. Most combatants overcome would be killed where they stood on the battleground, and only those of high social status would be taken prisoner. These men were valuable assets, and it was rarely in the best interest of the enemy to treat them poorly: they were worth more alive.

A Feeling for Things, Past and Present

This chapter gives an overview of the state of cross-disciplinary research into objects and emotions. It considers major intellectual works from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, art and design history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology from the perspective of the history of emotions, in order to assess which current major directions in these fields may be most useful for those seeking to write affective histories of the material world. By investigating the critical history of objects and emotions and reflecting on the state of the field today, the authors offer an interdisciplinary frame for the essays that follow, outlining various methodologies and their implications for emotions research in the humanities in general.

Not for Profit: “Amateur” Readers of French Poetry in Late Medieval England

In a letter to John Paston, Henry Windsor compares William Worcester’s delight in having “a good booke of Frensh or of poetre” with John Fastolf’s pleasure in purchasing a manor-house. Worcester’s reading habit was clearly an expensive one, and he was already in debt to his instructor for the purchase of “diverse bokes”: there is a considerable financial risk, Windsor tells Paston he has tried to warn their mutual acquaintance, in buying too many. But what, on the surface, is a rather unlikely comparison of late medieval book and manor-house invites us to think about the pleasure of purchasing goods for personal use in the later medieval period. In this case, the pleasure of purchasing material to read is similar to the pleasure of owning a home: the latter is a domestic, architectural space; the former designates a “space” for reading—perhaps domestically—with pages rather than rooms through which the purchaser might wander. As described by Windsor, Worcester’s particular bibliophilic pleasure was in acquiring books of poetry and books written in French. Both of these taken together, will be the subject of this chapter, which considers the practice of reading continental French poetry in late medieval England, the affective potential of such reading, and some of the ways in which surviving manuscripts can offer evidence of French reading in England The chapter provides a brief description and case study of one such manuscript—London, Westminster Abbey MS 21 (hereafter, Westminster MS 21)—in which a number of late fifteenth-century English readers left their trace.

Introduction — War as Emotion: Cultural Fields of Conflict and Feeling

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.

How to be ‘Both’: Bilingual and Gendered Emotions in Late Medieval English Balade Sequences

In the field of late medieval English literary study, work by Ardis Butterfield, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Judith Jefferson, and Ad Putter, among others, has confirmed that continental French continued to influence the production and consumption of secular literature in England until well into the fifteenth century.1 Those who used French most often — usually, the literate, educated, male elite — ensured the ongoing importance of the language in the political, social, and emotional \life of the court. How the bilingual culture of England’s aristocracy impacted on the work of poets in late medieval England is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates in particular on the relationship between bilingualism — whether individual or cultural — and the expression of emotion in literature. My focus in this chapter is on two secular balade sequences, one written in French, the other in English, by authors who wrote and probably spoke fluently in more than one language: John Gower (c. 1330–1408), court poet during the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV; and Charles of Orleans (1394-1465), taken by the English at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, and held prisoner in England for 25 years. Both men were ‘bilingual’ in that they spoke at least French and English fluently (Gower’s work also survives in Latin), and both wrote lyric sequences in what sociolinguists would today call an ‘L2’ or acquired tongue.

French Feeling: Language, Sex and Identity in Henry V

In the famous ‘wooing’ scene at the end of Henry V, Henry worries that Catherine of France will mock him for his French speech: ‘I shall never move thee in French’, Henry says, ‘unless it be to laugh at me’ (5.2.181–182).1 This is one of many exchanges between the two characters that foreground the difficulty of expression in a second language. Henry’s concern, however, is a direct inversion of modern criticism that reads the French language and the French people together as targets of ridicule and sources of humour in Shakespeare’s play.2 In the character of Catherine, especially, critics have argued that the negative qualities of the French are concentrated into a ‘laughable effeminacy’.3 Certainly, jokes and puns that use French words and phrases abound in Henry V, and many (though by no means all) are associated with the French princess. Such jokes, however, often rely heavily on an audience’s understanding of French vocabulary to ‘get’ the joke. Bilingual wordplay allows audience members familiar with French privileged access to the play’s comic scenes. Rather than degrading and humiliating either the princess or the French as a group, this builds a form of aural sympathy between audience members and French-speaking characters in Henry V, not all of whom are ‘French’ themselves.

Anglo-Norman in Exile: The Early Critical Reception of Piers Langtoft’s Chronicle

In the twenty-first century scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the multilingualism of Britain in the last centuries of the Middle Ages. This article further challenges long-held narratives of the ‘triumph’ of English by exploring the ‘making’ of Anglo-Norman and its subsequent marginalization within the academy. It focuses on the reception of the chronicle of Piers Langtoft (c. 1307), largely during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and analyses the processes by which the language in which it was written became culturally, historically, and geographically established - in order that it might be expelled.

Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters by Vanessa Smith (review)

Review(s) of: Intimate strangers: Friendship, exchange and pacific encounters, by Smith, Vanessa, (Critical Perspectives on Empire), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, paperback, pp. 336, 18 b/w illustrations, R.R.P. 20.99 pounds, ISBN 9780521728782.

L'Offrande du coeur: Medieval and Early Modern Studies in Honour of Glynnis Cropp (review)

Parergon 24.1 (2007) Chapters four and five are devoted to poetic visions of the Great Schism. The most important writers of the era – Philippe de Mézières and Eustache Deschamps, discussed in chapter four, and Honoré Bovet and Christine de Pizan, discussed in chapter five – ponder the phenomenon through a variety of images. BlumenfeldKosinski concludes that these writers ‘showed kings and popes where their duty lay; and they visualize for us what it meant to live in a time when the church could be considered a two-headed monster or a suffering mother victimized by her children’ (p. 163). The study ends with ‘Prophets of the Great Schism’. During this period of intense prophetic activity, the various positions concerning the Schism were articulated and argued in a veritable war of prophecies, some created specifically for the situation and some recycled from earlier periods, but with new interpretations attached. One of the most fascinating aspects of the prophecy literature was its frequent visualization of the Schism as a first sign of the impending apocalypse. The multitude of opinions Blumenfeld-Kosinski collects in this study prove that, if it is impossible to generalize about the effects of the Schism upon the popular imagination, the event nonetheless was experienced across society as an evil. As she concludes, ‘Far from being a problem for the papacy only, the Schism created political and spiritual fissures throughout Europe, causing deep anxiety for many Christians of all classes...’ (p. 208). Tracy Adams School of European Languages and Literatures University of Auckland