Death and Violence in Old and Middle English Literature

By John William Sutton

This book explores how medieval English authors used the spectacle of a character's death to express their views about the martial culture of their aristocratic countrymen. The argument is set forth that authorial attitudes toward the warrior ethos evolved from respect or even veneration during the Anglo-Saxon period to condemnation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when, after hundreds of years of incessant warfare, writers came to see this ethos as little more than a system of institutionalized violence. Given the texts it considers, this book should appeal particularly to Anglo-Saxonists and Arthurianists, as well as to scholars of war in the Middles Ages and to gender theorists who study medieval conceptions of masculinity.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0773454691
• ISBN13: 9780773454699
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: Edwin Mellen Pr
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.0"