Battlefield Emotions in Late Antiquity is the first work to offer a comprehensive analysis of morale and fear. Różycki examines Roman military treatises to illustrate the methods of manipulating the human psyche.

What do the mysterious Roman author Vegetius, the Byzantine emperor Leo VI, and the Chinese general Li Jing all have in common? They are three of the dozens of authors across the medieval Mediterranean world and beyond who wrote works of military literature, sometimes called military handbooks, manuals, or treatises. This book brings together a multidisciplinary international team of scholars who present cutting edge essays on diverse aspects of medieval military literature. While some chapters offer novel approaches to familiar authors like Vegetius, some present research on under-valued topics like Byzantine military illustrations, and others provide holistic studies on subjects like early modern treatises, they all move the discussion of medieval military literature forward. Contributors are Michael B. Charles, Georgios Chatzelis, Pierre Cosme, Maxime Emion, Immacolata Eramo, Michael Fulton, David Graff, John Haldon, Catherine Hof, John Hosler, Savvas Kyriakidis, Łukasz Różycki, Katharina Schoneveld, Georgios Theotokis, Conor Whately, Michael Whitby, and Nadya Williams.

This volume examines interdisciplinary boundaries and includes texts focusing on material culture, philological analysis, and historical research. What they all have in common are zones that lie in between, treated not as mere barriers but also as places of exchange in the early Middle Ages. Focusing on borderlands, Continuation or Change uncovers the changing political and military organisations at the time and the significance of the functioning of former borderland areas. The chapters answer how the fiscal and military apparatus were organised, identify the turning points in the division of dynastic power, and assign meaning to the assimilation of certain symbolic and ideological elements of the imperial tradition. Finally, the authors offer answers to what exactly a "statehood without a state" was in regard to semi-peripheral and peripheral areas that were also perceived through the prism of the idea of a world system, network theory, or the concept of so-called negotiating borderlands. Continuation or Change is a useful resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in medieval warfare, Eastern European history, medieval border regions, and cross-cultural interaction.

This book examines the lasting impact of war on individuals and their communities in pre-modern Europe. Research on combat stress in the modern era regularly draws upon the past for inspiration and validation, but to date no single volume has effectively scrutinised the universal nature of combat stress and its associated modern diagnoses. Highlighting the methodological obstacles of using modern medical and psychological models to understand pre-modern experiences, this book challenges existing studies and presents innovative new directions for future research. With cutting-edge contributions from experts in history, classics and medical humanities, the collection has a broad chronological focus, covering periods from Archaic Greece (c. sixth and early fifth century BCE) to the British Civil Wars (seventeenth century CE). Topics range from the methodological, such as the dangers of retrospective diagnosis and the applicability of Moral Injury to the past, to the conventionally historical, examining how combat stress and post-traumatic stress disorder may or may not have manifested in different time periods. With chapters focusing on combatants, women, children and the collective trauma of their communities, this collection will be of great interest to those researching the history of mental health in the pre-modern period.

Byzantinists entered the study of emotion with Henry Maguire’s ground-breaking article on sorrow, published in 1977. Since then, classicists and western medievalists have developed new ways of understanding how emotional communities work and where the ancients’ concepts of emotion differ from our own, and Byzantinists have begun to consider emotions other than sorrow. It is time to look at what is distinctive about Byzantine emotion. This volume is the first to look at the constellation of Byzantine emotions. Originating at an international colloquium at Dumbarton Oaks, these papers address issues such as power, gender, rhetoric, or asceticism in Byzantine society through the lens of a single emotion or cluster of emotions. Contributors focus not only on the construction of emotions with respect to perception and cognition but also explore how emotions were communicated and exchanged across broad (multi)linguistic, political and social boundaries. Priorities are twofold: to arrive at an understanding of what the Byzantines thought of as emotions and to comprehend how theory shaped their appraisal of reality. Managing Emotion in Byzantium will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in Byzantine perceptions of emotion, Byzantine Culture, and medieval perceptions of emotion.

This volume explores a broad range of perceptions, receptions and constructions of the soldierly body in the ancient world, putting the notion of embodiment at the forefront of its engagement with ancient warfare. The 10 chapters presented here respond directly to the question of how war was embodied in antiquity by drawing on detailed case studies to examine the sensory and bodily experience of combat across wide-ranging time periods and geographies, from classical Greece and Rome to Roman Britain and Persia. Together they illustrate how the body in war is a vital universal element that unites these vastly different contexts. Although the centrality of the human body in war-making was recognized in antiquity, a body-centric approach to combat has yet to be widely adopted in modern Classical Studies. This collection brings together new research in ancient history, classical literature, material culture, bioarchaeology and art history within a theoretical framework drawn from recent developments in War Studies that places the body front and centre. The new perspectives it offers on brutality in battle, the physical expression of warrior identity, and post-combat remembrance and recovery challenge readers to re-assess and expand their existing ideas as part of a broader ongoing 'call to arms' to revolutionize the study of ancient warfare in the 21st century.

Our period opens at the end of the Roman Empire when intellectual currents are indebted to the Greek philosophical inheritance of Plato and Aristotle, as well as to a Romanized Stoicism. Into this mix entered the new, and from 313CE imperially sanctioned, religion of Christianity. In art, literature, music, and drama, we find an increasing emphasis on the arousal of individual emotions and their acceptance as a means towards devotion. In religion, we see a move from the ascetic regulation of emotions to the affective piety of the later medieval period that valued the believer's identification with the Passion of Christ and the sorrow of Mary. In science and medicine, the nature and causes of emotions, their role in constituting the human person, and their impact on the same became a subject of academic inquiry. Emotions also played an increasingly important public role, evidenced in populace-wide events such as conversion and the strategies of rulership. Between 350 and 1300, emotions were transformed from something to be transcended into a location for meditation upon what it means to be human.

This study addresses two desiderata of historical emotion research: reflecting on the interdependence of textual functions and the representation of emotions, and acknowledging the interdependence of studies on the premodern and modern periods in the history of emotion. Contemporary research on the history of emotion is characterised by a proliferation of studies on very different eras, authors, themes, texts, and aspects. The enthusiasm and confidence with which situations, actions, and interactions involving emotions in history are discovered, however, has led to overly direct attempts to access the represented objects (emotions/feelings/affects); as a result, too little attention has been paid to the conditions and functions of their representations. That is why this study engages with the emotion research of historians from an unashamedly philological perspective. Such an approach provides, among other things, insights into the varied, often contradictory, observations that can be made about the history of emotion in modernity and premodernity.

This volume addresses the place of the emotions in literary representations of war across six centuries of European history. It challenges modern assumptions about the passions and feelings attending violent conflict in order to reveal the multifarious historical emotions and emotional histories of war.