Under Siege

A new account of medieval literature, told through its entanglements with the culture of perpetual warfare that helped engender it

Under Siege offers a new account of medieval literature, told through its entanglements with the culture of perpetual warfare that helped engender it. Daniel Davies argues that late medieval writers in England theorized the territorial conflicts endemic to medieval Europe as a distinct worldview centered on war. Unlike today, when war is seen as an exceptional rupture to the state of peace, medieval writers saw war as the default state of society and peace a mere cessation of battles soon to recommence.

Davies traces the emergence of this notion of perpetual war in texts produced between c. 1360 and 1460, a period of interlocking domestic and international conflict. From the development of the first legal treatise on war to the siege poetics of Troilus and Criseyde, late medieval authors reflected and constructed war as both an enduring fact of political life and a force that shaped the lives of those living through it. Through close readings of the work of French intellectuals Honoré Bovet and Christine de Pizan; English authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, who experienced the waning of English military efforts after the successes of Edward III; and Thomas Hoccleve, who witnessed the rearming of the English war state under Henry IV and Henry V, Davies shows how war served as an engine of textual creation.

Pushing back against narratives that treat the Hundred Years War as a singular and discrete conflict that brings the Middle Ages into modernity, Davies demonstrates how medieval writers grappled with war as a permanent condition of earthly existence. Under Siege shows how even the literary activities of peacetime, such as the writing of poetry, mediate anxieties around perpetual warfare that continue to resonate beyond the Middle Ages.