Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare

Essays consider the variety of responses to warfare and combat in medieval literature. War is a powerful and enduring literary topos, a repeated theme in both secular and religious literary genres of the middle ages. The idea and practice of war is central to some of the most dominant subject matters in the medievalperiod - as well as to chivalry, to religion, to ideas of nationhood, to concepts of gender, the body and the psyche. This book considers the variety of responses to warfare and comba