ESSAYS AND STUDIES 2014 E WAR and S S A Y War was the first subject of literature; at times, war has S been its only subject. In this volume, the contributors A N LITERATURE reflect on the uneasy yet symbiotic relations of war and D writing, from medieval to modern literature. War writing S T emerges in multiple forms, celebratory and critical, awed U D and disgusted; the rhetoric of inexpressibility fights its I E S own battle with the urgent necessity of representation, 2 record and recognition. This is shown to be true even 0 1 Edited by LAURA ASHE and IAN PATTERSON to the present day: whether mimetic or metaphorical, 4 literature that concerns itself overtly or covertly with the real pressures of war continues to speak to issues of pressing significance, and to provide some clues to the W L intricate entwinement of war with contemporary life. A A Particular topics addressed include writings of and about U R the Crusades and battles during the Hundred Years War; R A Shakespeare’s treatment of war; Auden’s ‘Journal of an A Airman’; and War and Peace. Sa Hn E IAN PATTERSON is a poet, critic and translator. d a He teaches English at Queens’ College, Cambridge. n dL LAURA ASHE is Associate Professor of English and a II A Tutorial Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. T N E CONTRIBUTORS: Joanna Bellis, Catherine A.M. Clarke, P A Mary A. Favret, Rachel Galvin, James Purdon, Mark R T Rawlinson, Susanna A. Throop, Katie L. Walter, Carol TA Watts, Tom F. Wright, Andrew Zurcher. E RT S Cover: Loyset Liédet and Pol Fruit, ‘The Battle before Roussillon’s OU Castle’. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, MS Ludwig XIII 6, N leaf 3. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. R ( e d E COVER DESIGN: SIMON LOXLEY s ) an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com Essays and Studies 2014 Series Editor: Elaine Treharne The English Association The objects of the English Association are to promote the knowledge and appreciation of the English language and its literature, and to foster good prac tice in its teaching and learning at all levels. The Association pursues these aims by creating opportunities of co-operation among all those interested in English; by furthering the recognition of English as essential in education; by discussing methods of English teaching; by holding lectures, conferences, and other meetings; by publishing journals, books, and leaflets; and by forming local branches. Publications The Year’s Work in English Studies. An annual bibliography. Published by Black- well. The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. An annual bibliography. Published by Blackwell. Essays and Studies. An annual volume of essays by various scholars assembled by the collector covering usually a wide range of subjects and authors from the medieval to the modern. Published by D.S. Brewer. English. A journal of the Association, English is published three times a year by the Association. The Use of English. A journal of the Association, The Use of English is published three times a year by the Association. Newsletter. A Newsletter is published three times a year giving information about forthcoming publications, conferences, and other matters of interest. Benefits of Membership Institutional Membership Full members receive copies of The Year’s Work in English Studies, Essays and Studies, English (3 issues) and three Newsletters. Ordinary Membership covers English (3 issues) and three Newsletters. Schools Membership includes copies of each issue of English and The Use of English, one copy of Essays and Studies, three Newsletters, and preferential booking and rates for various conferences held by the Association. Individual Membership Individuals take out Basic Membership, which entitles them to buy all regular publications of the English Association at a discounted price, and attend Asso- ciation gatherings. For further details write to The Secretary, The English Association, The Univer- sity of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, le1 7rh. Essays and Studies 2014 War and Literature Edited by Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson for the English Association D. S. BREWER ESSAYS AND STUDIES 2014 IS VOLUME SIXTY-SEVEN IN THE NEW SERIES OF ESSAYS AND STUDIES COLLECTED ON BEHALF OF THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION ISSN 0071–1357 © The English Association 2014 All Rights Reserved. Unauthorised publication contravenes applicable laws First published 2014 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731 USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN 978–1–84384–381–8 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites re- ferred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper Contents List of Illustrations vii Notes on Contributors viii Preface xi i ideologies Acts of Vengeance, Acts of Love: Crusading Violence in the Twelfth Century 3 Susanna A. Throop Peril, Flight and the Sad Man: Medieval Theories of the Body in Battle 21 Katie L. Walter ‘Is this War?’: British Fictions of Emergency in the Hot Cold War 41 James Purdon ii interpretations Crossing the Rubicon: History, Authority and Civil War in Twelfth-Century England 61 Catherine A. M. Clarke ‘The Reader myghte lamente’: The sieges of Calais (1346) and Rouen (1418) in chronicle, poem and play 84 Joanna Bellis Shakespeare’s Casus Belly; or, Cormorant War, and the Wasting of Men on Shakespeare’s Stage; or, Eating Wars and Digesting Plays; or, The Art of Chucking Men Into Pits; or, Shakespeare, Tacitism, and Why Plato Don’t Matter 107 Andrew Zurcher vi CONTENTS Unnavigable Kinship in a Time of Conflict: Loyalist Calligraphies, Sovereign Power and the ‘Muckle Honor’ of Elizabeth Murray Inman 139 Carol Watts Proclaiming the War News: Richard Caton Woodville and Herman Melville 163 Tom F. Wright iii aftermaths A Feeling for Numbers: Representing the Scale of the War Dead 185 Mary A. Favret The Guilt of the Noncombatant and W. H. Auden’s ‘Journal of an Airman’ 205 Rachel Galvin Does Tolstoy’s War and Peace Make Modern War Literature Redundant? 228 Mark Rawlinson Index 249 List of Illustrations Unnavigable Kinship in a Time of Conflict: Loyalist Calligraphies, Sovereign Power and the ‘Muckle Honor’ of Elizabeth Murray Inman Fig. 1: ‘Like a Thunder Clape’: Henry Caner to Deacon Thomas Foster, London, 10 January 1778. Henry Caner Letterbook, Bristol University Library. With thanks to Bristol University Library Special Collections for permission to reproduce the author’s digital image of the original letterbook. 150 Fig. 2: ‘I have the pleasure’: Elizabeth Murray Inman to ‘dear friends’, Cambridge, 22 April 1775, Massachusetts Historical Society: James Murray Robbins Family Papers, page 1. With thanks to the MHS and The Elizabeth Murray Project website (www.csulb.edu/projects/elizabethmurray/EM/index.html) for permission to reproduce sections of this letter. 154 Fig. 3a: ‘Dear Sir’ and Fig. 3b: ‘Dont think Us drunk’: Elizabeth Murray Inman to ‘dear friends’, Cambridge, 22 April 1775, Massachusetts Historical Society: James Murray Robbins Family Papers, pages 3, 4. With thanks to the MHS and The Elizabeth Murray Project website (www.csulb.edu/projects/ elizabethmurray/EM/index.html) for permission to reproduce sections of this letter. 156 Proclaiming the War News: Richard Caton Woodville and Herman Melville Fig. 1: Richard Caton Woodville, War News From Mexico (1848). Oil on canvas, 27 × 25 in. (68.6 × 63.5 cm). Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo © The Walters Art Museum, Susan Tobin. 162 Notes on Contributors Laura Ashe is Associate Professor in English and a tutorial fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. She is the author of Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (2007) and co-editor of The Exploitations of Medieval Romance (2010). She is now writing the new Oxford English Literary History vol. 1: 1000–1350. Joanna Bellis is the Harry F. Guggenheim Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, working on war literature from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Her current projects include a critical edition of John Page’s eyewitness poem The Siege of Rouen, and a monograph on accounts of the Hundred Years War in medieval and early modern liter- ature, provisionally entitled The Word in the Sword: Writing the Hundred Years War, 1337–1600. Catherine Clarke is Professor of English at the University of Southampton. A specialist in medieval literature and culture, her pub- lications include the monographs Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 (2006) and Writing Power in Anglo-Saxon England: Texts, Hierarchies, Economies (2012). She has a particular interest in depictions of civil war in earlier medieval England, especially in the context of the twelfth-century ‘Anarchy’. Mary A. Favret is Professor of English and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her most recent book is War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (2010). Her scholarly interests currently include reading as a visual practice, the affective force of numbers, and the novels of Jane Austen. Rachel Galvin is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. She is currently writing a book titled Poetry and the Press in Wartime and co-editing a volume of essays, Auden at Work, with Bonnie Costello. Galvin is the author of a book of poems, NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix Pulleys & Locomotion (2009), and the translator of Hitting the Streets by Raymond Queneau (2013). Ian Patterson is a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He is the author of Guernica and Total War (2007) and translator of Proust’s Finding Time Again (2004). He has published on war and pacifism and is now working on a new assessment of writing and left-wing politics between 1929 and 1950, and writing an analy- sis of contemporary literary culture through a hostile critique of Ian McEwan’s work. James Purdon is a Research Fellow in English at Jesus College, Cambridge. His published work includes articles on Joseph Conrad, on espionage fiction, and on the British cultural response to national electrification. He is currently preparing a book about state information systems and modernist narrative. Mark Rawlinson is Reader in English at the University of Leicester. He has published extensively on the cultures of modern warfare, including British Writing of the Second World War (2000). Current work includes editing a series of anthologies of war plays for Methuen, writing a book of literary criticism provisionally titled The Future of First World War Poetry, and finishing a book on narratives of the Second World War after 1945. Susanna A. Throop is Assistant Professor of History at Ursinus College. A cultural historian of the crusading movement in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe, she is the author of Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 1095–1216 (2011) and co-editor with Paul Hyams of Vengeance in the Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion and Feud (2010). She is currently co-editing The Crusades and Visual Culture with Elizabeth Lapina, Laura J. Whatley, and April J. Morris. Katie Walter is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at the University of Sussex. She is the editor of Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture (2013), and (with Mary C. Flannery) The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England (2013), and has a forthcoming monograph on the mouth in medieval traditions. Carol Watts is Professor of Literature and Poetics in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. Her