Kalamazoo 2019: Beyond the Battlefield: Medieval Literature in Wartime
How does medieval war resonate beyond the battlefield? This roundtable session invites papers that consider the relationship between medieval literature and wartime. War punctuates our understanding of the Middle Ages, providing us with frameworks for comprehending and interpreting the events of history, and the corpus of literature created in response to these conditions is equally broad. In its most literal sense, wartime literature is the narration or memorialization of events on the battlefield, from the Battle of Maldon to the work of Jordan Fantosme and the poetry attributed to Laurence Minot. Wartime, however, is less a temporal or veridical marker than a loaded conceptual term. What counts as wartime? When does it begin and end?