Battlefield Emotions 1500–1800: Practices, Experience, Imagination

Abstract

This book explores changes in emotional cultures of the early modern battlefield. Military action involves extraordinary modes of emotional experience and affective control of the soldier, and it evokes strong emotional reactions in society at large. While emotional experiences of actors and observers may differ radically, they can also be tightly connected through social interaction, cultural representations and mediatisation. The book integrates psychological, social and cultural perspectives on the battlefield, looking at emotional behaviour, expression and representation in a great variety of primary source material. In three steps it discusses the emotional practices in the army, the emotional experiences of the individual combatant and the emotions of the mediated battlefield in the visual arts. Introduction -- Battlefield Emotions 1500-1800: Practices, experience, imagination / Erika Kuijpers and Cornelis van der Haven -- Part I: The Military: Emotional Practices and Community -- 1. Drill and Allocution as Emotional Practices in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Poetry, Plays and Military Treatises / Cornelis van der Haven -- 2. Magical Swords and Heavenly Weapons: Battlefield Fear(lessness) in the Seventeenth Century / Andreas Bähr -- 3. Emotions, Imagination and Surgery: Wounded Warriors in the Work of Ambroise Paré and Johan van Beverwijck / Bettina Noak -- 4. Fear, Honour and Emotional Control on the Eighteenth-Century Battlefield / Ilya Berkovich -- Reflections I. Early Modern Jokes on Fearing Soldiers / Johan Verberckmoes -- Part II: The Combatant: Emotional Experience and Writing -- 5. 'His Courage Produced More Fear in His Enemies than Shame in His Soldiers': Siege Combat and Emotional Display in the French Wars of Religion / Brian Sandberg -- 6. Emotions in the Making: The Transformation of Battlefield Experiences During the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) / Marian Füssel -- 7. Mediated Battlefields of the French Revolution and Emotives at Work / Ian Germani -- Reflections II. Whose Battlefield Emotion? / Mary A. Favret -- Part III: The Public: Emotional Re-Creation -- 8. The Sidelong Glance: Tracing Battlefield Emotions in Dutch Art of the Golden Age / Lisa de Boer -- 9. Deflecting the Fire of Eighteenth-Century French Battle Painting / Valerie Mainz -- 10. Picturing Valenciennes: Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg and the Emotional Regulation of British Military Art in the 1790s / Philip Shaw -- Conclusions and perspectives -- Battlefield Emotions in Early Modern Europe: Trends, Key Issues and Blind Spots / Dorothee Sturkenboom -- List of Authors.