Death and Violence in Old and Middle English Literature

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 ofwar in the Middles Ages and to gender theorists who study medieval conceptions of masculinity.John William is the author of 'Death and Violence in Old and Middle English Literature', published 2007 under ISBN 9780773454699 and ISBN 0773454691.