Violence, Trauma, and Memory: Responses to War in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World brings together eight essays that examine medieval and early modern violence and warfare in France, the Hispanic World, and the Dutch Republic through the lens of trauma studies and memory studies. By focusing on warfare, these essays by historians, literary specialists, and historians of visual culture demonstrate how individuals and groups living with the "ungraspable" outcomes of wartime violence grappled with processing and remembering (both culturally and politically) the trauma of war.

This book analyzes how acts of feeling at a discursive, somatic, and rhetorical level were theorized and practiced in multiple medieval and early-modern sources (literary, medical, theological, and archival). It covers a large chronological and geographical span from eleventh-century France, to fifteenth-century Iberia and England, and ending with seventeenth-century Jesuit meditative literature. Essays in this book explore how particular emotional norms belonging to different socio-cultural communities (courtly, academic, urban elites) were subverted or re-shaped; engage with the study of emotions as sudden, but impactful, bursts of sensory experience and feelings; and analyze how emotions are filtered and negotiated through the prism of literary texts and the socio-political status of their authors.

Johan Huizinga’s much-loved and much-contested Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. Many studies, particularly literary studies, have challenged Huizinga’s perceptions of individual works or genres. Still, the vision of the Late French and Burgundian Middle Ages as a sad transitional phase between the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance persists. Yet, a series of exceptionally significant cultural developments mark the period. The Waxing of the Middle Ages sets out to provide a rich, complex, and diverse study of these developments and to reassert that late medieval France is crucial in its own right. The collection argues for an approach that views the late medieval period not as an afterthought, or a blind spot, but as a period that is key in understanding the fluidity of time, traditions, culture, and history. Each essay explores some “cultural form,� to borrow Huizinga’s expression, to expose the false divide that has dominated modern scholarship.

Johan Huizinga’s much-loved and much-contested Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. Many studies, particularly literary studies, have challenged Huizinga’s perceptions of individual works or genres. Still, the vision of the Late French and Burgundian Middle Ages as a sad transitional phase between the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance persists. Yet, a series of exceptionally significant cultural developments mark the period. The Waxing of the Middle Ages sets out to provide a rich, complex, and diverse study of these developments and to reassert that late medieval France is crucial in its own right. The collection argues for an approach that views the late medieval period not as an afterthought, or a blind spot, but as a period that is key in understanding the fluidity of time, traditions, culture, and history. Each essay explores some “cultural form,� to borrow Huizinga’s expression, to expose the false divide that has dominated modern scholarship.

This book analyzes how acts of feeling at a discursive, somatic, and rhetorical level were theorized and practiced in multiple medieval and early-modern sources (literary, medical, theological, and archival). It covers a large chronological and geographical span from eleventh-century France, to fifteenth-century Iberia and England, and ending with seventeenth-century Jesuit meditative literature. Essays in this book explore how particular emotional norms belonging to different socio-cultural communities (courtly, academic, urban elites) were subverted or re-shaped; engage with the study of emotions as sudden, but impactful, bursts of sensory experience and feelings; and analyze how emotions are filtered and negotiated through the prism of literary texts and the socio-political status of their authors.