Abstract
The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat, Victoria, was opened in 2004 to commemorate more than 36,000 Australian prisoners taken during the Boer War, First and Second World Wars, and the Korean War. Its design included an inscribed granite slab and a pool of water in acknowledgement of ‘the pain and suffering of those that returned and those that remain on foreign shores’ and to remember ‘those men and women who, while captured, suffered appalling hardship and horrendous atrocities but maintained their dignity, courage and mateship’.1 In the later medieval period that this essay considers, the experience of those captured in conflict was less likely to reach the levels of human suffering recalled at the Ballarat memorial. Most combatants overcome would be killed where they stood on the battleground, and only those of high social status would be taken prisoner. These men were valuable assets, and it was rarely in the best interest of the enemy to treat them poorly: they were worth more alive.
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Notes
Guillaume de Machaut, Le Confort d’ami (Comfort for a friend), ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer, Garland Library 67, Series A (New York and London: Garland, 1992).
Rémy Ambühl, Prisoners of War in the Hundred Years War: Ransom Culture in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5.
See Joseph Stevenson, Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France during the Reign of King Henry the Sixth, 2 vols. (Repr. NY 1968) 2.1.235–36. 1440, pp. 451–60. From Ashmole MS 8561, fol. 413.
Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010).
William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
For example, Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, ed. Corinne Saunders, Françoise Le Saux and Neil Thomas (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004).
A. C. Spearing, ‘Prison, Writing, Absence: Representing the Subject in the English Poems of Charles of Orleans’, Modern Language Quarterly, 53 (1992): 83–89, at 83.
Daniel Poirion, Le Poete et le Prince: l’evolution du lyrisme courtois, de Guillaume de Machat à Charles d’Orléans (Paris, 1965; Geneva: Slatkine, 1978), 107.
Mary-Jo Arn, Charles d’Orléans in England 1415–1440 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 7.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books (Chatto and Windus: London, 1882), 289.
Mary-Jo Arn, ‘Two Manuscripts One Mind: Charles d’Orléans and the Production of Manuscripts in Two Languages (Paris BN MS fr. 25458 and London BL MS Harley 682)’, in Charles d’Orléans in England 1415–1440, ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 61–78.
On the relationship between love and war in literature, see Venus and Mars: Engendering Love and War in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Lynch and Philippa Maddern (University of Western Australia Press, 1995); and in Chaucer’s writing, Andrew Lynch, ‘Love in Wartime: Troilus and Criseyde as Trojan History’, in A Concise Companion to Chaucer, ed. Corinne Saunders (Maldon: Blackwell, 2006), 113–33.
See Isabelle Betemps, ‘Guerre et paix dans la poésie lyrique du XVe siècle: Alain Chartier, Pierre de Nesson, Charles d’Orléans’, Images de la guerre de Cent Ans (Rouen: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 113–23; Susan Crane, ‘Charles of Orleans: Self-Translator,’ The Medieval Translator 8 (2003): 169–77. Mary-Jo Arn, Introduction, Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Orléans’s English Book of Love, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 138 (New York, 1994), 1–129; A. E. B. Coldiron, Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles of Orléans: Found in Translation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
French Ballade 41, Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle: A Critical Edition of BnF MS. Fr. 25458, Charles d’Orléans’s Personal Manuscript, ed. John Fox and Mary-Jo Arn (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 90–1. Unless otherwise stated, all modern English translations of Charles’s French poetry are from this facing-page bilingual edition.
English Ballade 41, Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Orleans’s English Book of Love, ed. Mary-Jo Arn. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 138 (New York, 1994), 188–9.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Thinking Historically and Medieval Emotions’, History Compass (2010), 828–42, at 834–6. On what medieval and early modern studies of peace might contribute to peace studies, see Peace and Negotiation: Strategies for Coexistence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Diane Wolfthal, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 4 (Turnout: Brepols, 2000); and Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas 1340–1560 (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 30–45.
Nicolas Offenstadt, Faire la Paix aux Moyen Age: Discours et Gestes de Paix Pendant la Guerre de Cent Ans (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003). See chapter 4, in particular, ‘Le Roi de Pais,’ 86–106.
Pierre Champion, ed. Charles d’Orléans: Poésies, 2 vol (Paris: Champion, 1923). French Ballade 114, Poetry of Charles and His Circle, 25–89.
Seth Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 17. The poem itself is one with which Charles may have been familiar. See Boffey, ‘Charles of Orleans Reading’, 43–62.
This example British Library MS Additional 34360, fol. 22 v. Further examples on fol. 23 r. See also this manuscript’s likely exemplar, Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.20, fols. 25, 32, 33, 35, 36. The lyrics are in fact by Alain Chartier. See Julia Boffey, ‘French Lyrics and English Manuscripts: The Transmission of Some Poems in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.20 and British Library MS Harley 7333’, Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 4 (1988), 135–46, at 141 and 146 n 22.
For a description, see Janet Backhouse, ‘Charles of Orléans Illuminated,’ in Charles d’Orléans in England (1415–1440), ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 157–64.
For an analysis of this series, see Ann Tukey Harrison, ‘Orleans and Burgundy: The Literary Relationship’, Stanford French Review, 4 (1980), 475–84.
Janet Backhouse, ‘Founders of the Royal Library: Edward IV and Henry VII as Collectors of Illuminated Manuscripts’, in England in the Fifteenth Century (Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium), ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1987), 23–41. See also Michel-André Bossy, ‘Charles d’Orléans and the Wars of the Roses: Yorkist and Tudor Implications of MS Royal 16 f ii’, in Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France, ed. Daniel E. O’Sullivan and Laurie Shepard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 61–82.
R. F. Yeager explores this question in relation to English vernacular poets during the Hundred Years War in ‘Pax Poetica: On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 9 (1987), 97–121. Christopher Allmand argues that in France, the majority of court poets were conscripted into supporting and justifying war with England, see ‘War, Propaganda and Diplomacy in Fifteenth-Century France and England’, in his War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 70–91.
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Downes, S. (2015). ‘Je Hé Guerre, Point Ne La Doy Prisier’: Peace and the Emotions of War in the Prison Poetry of Charles d’Orléans. In: Downes, S., Lynch, A., O’Loughlin, K. (eds) Emotions and War. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374073_4
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