This collection assembles work by some of the foremost English-speaking scholars of pre-modern thought and culture and is the fruit of the Australian Research Council's ground-breaking Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion. The impact of war, a human activity that is both public and politically charged, is examined as it affects private human lives caught up in public and political situations. The essays, many of them influenced by the burgeoning field of study in the history of emotions, examine the often unconsidered effects of war—on the individual and on the commune—as revealed in the study of well-known texts such as Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, as well as other lesser-known works that mirror the concerns of the society in which they were conceived. These latter range from the twelfth-century chansons of the Crusades, through the fifteenth-century French and English political works of Alain Chartier, to the twentieth-century anti-war satirical films of Mario Monicelli.

Claire McIlroy is an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia and was an active member of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
Anne M. Scott is an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia, and has published widely on Middle English literature.

Preface: Andrew Lynch
Introduction: The Long Reach of War, Claire McIlroy and Anne M. Scott
PART I: THE EMOTIONAL COSTS OF WAR
Chapter One: Love in Times of War: Some Shakespearean reflections, Robert S. White
Chapter Two: “she shal bryngen us the pees on every syde”: The Ceremonial Restoration of Women in Late Medieval Culture, Stephanie Downes and Stephanie Trigg
Chapter Three: Emotions and War in Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale”, Raluca Radulescu
Chapter Four: Making Dole inMalory, Karen Cherewatuk
PART II: VOICING CONLFICT
Chapter Five: The Hero “Remembers”: gemunan in Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon, Ad Putter
Chapter Six: The Hard Parting: Conflicting Codes of fin’amors and Christian Duty in Medieval chansons de croisade, Helen Dell
Chapter Seven: Christ versus Lucifer in Piers Plowman, Anne M. Scott
Chapter Eight: Breathing in Peace and War: Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, Corinne Saunders
Chapter Nine: Giving and Gaining Voice in Civil War: Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue Invectif in Fifteenth-Century England, James Simpson
PART III: THE IMPACT OF WAR
Chapter Ten: Oriental Despotism and the Reception of Romance, John M. Ganim
Chapter Eleven: Belon, Palissy, Ronsard, and the War for the Forests of France, Susan Broomhall
Chapter Twelve: Holy War, Cold War: War, Comedy, and the Lessons of History in the Films of Mario Monicelli, Louise D’Arcens