Reading and War in Fifteenth-Century England: From Lydgate to Malory by Catherine Nall (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading and War in Fifteenth-Century England: From Lydgate to Malory by Catherine Nall Andrew Lynch Catherine Nall. Reading and War in Fifteenth-Century England: From Lydgate to Malory. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012. Pp. viii, 197. £50.00; $90.00. Catherine Nall’s scholarly and carefully referenced study seeks to show how the context of war influenced fifteenth-century writing, and that, conversely, all kinds of texts were written to have effects on the understanding and even the conduct of war-making. She takes as a paradigm Hoccleve’s “Address to Sir John Oldcastle” (1415), in which the poet represents Oldcastle as a knight led into heresy by his unsuitable reading in divinity, but who could be redeemed by reading romances and Vegetius’s De re militari—literature appropriate to the order of knighthood. If Sir John would only apply himself to the right books he could be serving Henry V in France instead of causing trouble at home. This example sets up extended studies of Lydgate’s Troy Book and Siege of Thebes, the anonymous Knyghthode and Bataile, and Malory’s Morte Darthur, where a chief interest of Nall’s analysis is to show topicality and particular relevance in literary material that could easily be underestimated as simply conventional rhetoric. Nall shows how important fifteenth-century literature was as a place to connect with, and comment on, hot topics in warfare. She singles out several related main themes: the need to seem reluctant to provoke war, except as a last resort in a just cause, and to come across as the rational and united party in proceedings; an awareness of the problems that military indiscipline and pillaging caused to the appearance of just and rational warfare; and the need to pay soldiers fully and promptly in order to forestall pillaging. She persuasively considers the significance of translations and adaptations of earlier texts, where she reads difference as “cultural creativity” (6). Preoccupations with the financial costs of war are seen as especially prominent; when a section on the responsibility of nobles in Chartier’s Quadrilogue invectif changed “voz vies et voz corps” (“your lives and bodies”) to “body and goodis,” it was because English nobles, unlike French ones, paid taxes to their princes (7–8). In an extended study of Lydgate’s Troy Book, Nall shows how Hector’s “penchant for pillage” (109), increased from Guido delle Colonne’s Historia, relates to moral and practical concerns about soldiers’ depredations on civilians in the war in France. Priam’s long and self-conscious public attempt to seek peace with the Greeks is also convincingly related to Henry V’s public attitude to his French territorial claims. [End Page 419] Nall’s approach includes a detailed study of English ownership of Vegetius manuscripts in the fifteenth century. Interestingly, she is able to show that the profile of De re militari grew after the downturn of English fortunes in France, and she provides strong evidence that military indiscipline caused by poor financing was considered the chief cause of the failure. Vegetius showed the way to do it properly next time. A good proportion of these texts belonged to military men who were often also important administrators, “a community of readers directly involved with the prosecution of war and the governance of the country” (31). Yet Vegetius also attracted female readers and people with an interest in heraldry, and seems to have been treated as sapiential literature commonly associated with mirrors for princes, showing “the interconnectedness of success in warfare and strong governance” (44). Accordingly, to stage the offer of a new translation of Vegetius to Henry VI, as Knyghthode and Bataile does, is an encouragement to make new war with France on a well-organized basis, and an ideological linking of Lancastrian rule with the ability to pursue the war effectively, uniting England in the process. Nall gives this not-very-well-known poem its due as an intense propaganda piece that commandeers the high ground in a partisan context, painting the king’s enemies as heretical Donatists and immoral Satanists fighting against an angelic army of loyal knights. Contemporary admiration for Knyghthode and Bataile as the right sort of...