The key to this book is the use of the plural “literatures” in its title. There has already been considerable attention to the interplay between the Hundred Years War and English literary culture of the later Middle Ages--witness Joanna Bellis’s The Hundred Years War in Literature 1337-1600 (2016) and Catherine Nall’s more chronologically focused Reading And War in Fifteenth Century England: From Lydgate to Malory (2012). The more general notion that war affected literary responses has been demonstrated by collections covering longer periods such as Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare (2004) and Representing War and Violence, 1250-1600 (2016). In all of these works mentioned, some of the authors in the book currently under review are debated. Several, not least Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pisan, are authors on whom there has been a considerable amount of critical analysis already undertaken, emphasising the impact of the context of the Anglo-French wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. After all, Chaucer actually served in the Hundred Years War and Christine’s literary responses to both civil and international conflict serve as historical sources in their own right.
This book ranges much more widely in its aim to demonstrate how the Hundred Years War “provides a necessary context for late medieval literature.” Twelve chapters are offered. Unsurprisingly, given that the war was generated by the ambitions of the English in France, the majority of chapters consider either Middle English or French literary works, but we also find chapters considering Latin literature produced on both sides of the Channel, as well as Italian and Welsh. A good number of chapters also adopt a comparative approach. Several also show that whilst war might seem to divide peoples of different areas and cultures, there was significant interplay and connection. That the English presence in France was so extended in chronological terms and involved substantial English settlement on French soil, and that English also had its own continuing Anglo-Norman linguistic culture, go far to explaining this situation. In this specific context, J. R. Mattison’s exploration of French books and male readers in fifteenth-century England makes a notable contribution. It provides a detailed analysis of French works both gifted out and received as gifts by Humphrey duke of Gloucester, revealing, through network analysis, existing as well as hoped-for connections forged between key individuals. Gift-giving was an important shaper of society, and this type of study also contributes much to our understanding of the importance of books per se, as a high status and meaningful gift and acquisition. As Mattison concludes: “French cuts across national boundaries and allyships to cultivate a cross-Channel community formed through a network of books and readers” (324).
The collection of essays is well structured into four thematic areas, each containing three chapters: “Genres”; “Figures and sites of mobility”; “Theorising war”; and “Lives during wartime.” The intention of the book as a whole is nicely elucidated in the editors’ introduction, with an added input by means of a preface by Ardis Butterfield, whose lament in her 2009 book, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War, that “the Hundred Years War has remained very much on the margins of literary history,” is surely consoled not only by the contents of this current book but also by the increasingly substantial body of work on the literatures of the period, as evidenced in the substantial bibliography provided at the end of the book. Of course, “literature” can be, and is here, widely defined. The genres covered in this collection include prose and poetry but also revelations, treatises and chronicles, which can all too often sit awkwardly between history and literature. Some works are known to have been written for an explicit purpose, such as the letter to Queen Isabeau of Christine de Pisan. Other works are at base imaginative creations into which we can read the influences of war and politics at a particular juncture. Across the book, some authors focus on one text or writer; others deploy a range of sources. All quotations from works in languages other than in English are usefully translated into English, which increases the value of the collection for undergraduate consumption.
Under “Genres,” Andrew Galloway provides an interesting insight into “tragedy,” with unusual comparison between Lydgate’s poetical works and Thomas Walsingham’s chronicles, revealing explicit influences of classical writings. For Elizaveta Strakhov, the genre is the pastourelle, extremely popular in late medieval France, which she interprets as a distinctive form of war protest against the failure of the upper classes to protect the population against English incursions. Her focus is on a specific collection of pastourelles in University of Pennsylvania MS Codex 902, and there are many fascinating and new points of detail presented in the piece. Daniel Davies switches the focus to Scotland, commonly the ally of France, drawing largely on chronicle sources and prophecy literature and showing how writers cultivated enmity.
Under “Figures and sites of memory,” David Wallace explores the significance of Chaucer’s visits to Italy, occasioned by the diplomacy of the war, which affected his poetics. Lynn Staley ranges across a number of Middle English texts to bring to notice the mercantile contribution to war and social change, not only through the motive of profit but also the perceived link between peace and prosperity. Helen Fulton treads a more unusual path in looking at the Welsh presence in Calais, the town which continued in English hands after the mid fifteenth-century end of the Hundred Years War, as commonly defined. She includes the text of a hitherto unpublished Welsh poem which observes that “When A Welshman goes missing, where can he be found except in Calais” (161). An ambitious conclusion is drawn that during the Hundred Years War, Wales was “transformed from an inward looking land at odds with England to a diverse nation that faced outwards across the Channel…” (161).
The three chapters under “Theorising war” focus largely on French writings. It would be hard to imagine a volume of this kind which did not have a contribution on Alain Chartier: here the focus of Lucas Wood is Chartier’s use of the dream format to think of a better political future. The use of the Songe was as common in French literature of the period as English, witness Philippe de Mézières’s Songe du Viel Pelerin of 1389, also treated in Stefan Vander Elst’s short consideration of “The Shared wound: Crusade and the Origins of the Hundred Years War,” which argues that de Mézières saw both the origins of the later medieval wars and their solution in crusade. Matthew Giancarlo ranges more widely in his discussion of chronicles as mirrors of war in England and France 1330-1415, arguing for a similar, underlying conservatism on the part of chroniclers, which made writers even from warring kingdoms share a common self-conception hostile to social upheaval.
The fourth section on “Lives during wartime” includes the previously mentioned study by Mattison on French books in England. The strength of this particular section of the volume is sustained by Alani Hicks-Bartlett’s discussion of “War, Tears and the Corporal Response in Christine de Pisan,” which emphasises the sheer physicality of her writings in terms not only of tears but also sickness, weariness, and somnolence, as “rhetorical strategising.” But for Christine, tears turn to laughter in her final work, “The Ditié de Jeanne d’Arc.” Mention of this future saint fits well with the contribution of Jennifer N. Brown on Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, both of whom lobbied in their distinctive and personal ways for peace in the Papal Schism and Hundred Years War. The influence of Bridget in England has previously been overlooked but was highly influential in Thomas Hoccleve’s “Regimen of Princes,” written for Prince Henry, providing a potential link to the latter’s foundation of a Bridgettine house once he acceded to the throne.
Each chapter has much of interest. The most powerful are the chapters with a sharp focus on the texts themselves. Less effective are those which spend too long on background, not least as this produces garbled history and, at worst, factual errors in the historical information. Perhaps a friendly historian might have been asked to look it over and to recommend more recent historical research instead of the rather generic and generalised historical works that the authors of some articles have tended to use. But this may point to a problem for cross-disciplinary work. When historians use literary sources in their work, they no doubt come across as ignorant of specialist literature as do literary specialists of historical research when setting the historical context for their works. Is there a solution to this problem? But this volume is ambitious and, as its editors remark, not the last word but an argument for further study on rethinking the relationship between war and literature across a wide range of literary and linguistic cultures (12).