Eastern Kentucky University

War Crimes in Late Medieval Literature

Institution

Eastern Kentucky University

Abstract

Our project took as its starting point the assertion that there was not yet a notion of "war crimes" in the chivalric literature of the late Middle Ages--texts like Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Malory's La Morte D'Arthur. Rather, chivalric communities--and the aristocracy--judged inappropriate behavior in wartime according to hierarchies that ranked such behavior as more or less "worthy." However, by the sixteenth century, there was the notion that a soldier--even a "knight"--could behave not just badly, but criminally during wartime. Each student in our group worked through a selection of primary texts-- both historical and literary—that provided evidence for when the transition from a hierarchical to a legal categorization of wartime behavior took place. They reported their findings in the form of a combined annotated bibliography, and a set of cross-indexed position papers which interpreted their collective research.

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War Crimes in Late Medieval Literature

Our project took as its starting point the assertion that there was not yet a notion of "war crimes" in the chivalric literature of the late Middle Ages--texts like Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Malory's La Morte D'Arthur. Rather, chivalric communities--and the aristocracy--judged inappropriate behavior in wartime according to hierarchies that ranked such behavior as more or less "worthy." However, by the sixteenth century, there was the notion that a soldier--even a "knight"--could behave not just badly, but criminally during wartime. Each student in our group worked through a selection of primary texts-- both historical and literary—that provided evidence for when the transition from a hierarchical to a legal categorization of wartime behavior took place. They reported their findings in the form of a combined annotated bibliography, and a set of cross-indexed position papers which interpreted their collective research.