tagging /u/WARitter for discussion of historical memory

As I became aware of "trauma studies" as an academia sub-focus, I actually did some poking around medieval scholarship and was surprised at how little I found. Medieval is usually a bit behind other fields in our adoption of hot theories and new directions, but not that far. The pattern seems to be that medieval historians, specifically, don't really address the topic that often. Medieval literature scholars do, but in my reading (and I am interested, so I've done a bit) they don't tend to problematize or historicize that concept of trauma--they sort of treat it as a given.

What medieval historians do talk about--and often in the same context as the literary critics treat trauma--is "historical memory," or the way the past is remembered and memorialized--that is, how it is made to have significance and meaning in one's own time. What the disjunction highlights, and what the lit stuff tends to glide over, is that multi-generational historical trauma, or inherited trauma, doesn't fit tidy modern narratives of victimization and sympathy.

The big thing that comes up in medieval is, of course, the memory/"recovered trauma" of the Crusades among Latin Europeans. It is NOT sexy or progressive to think of the Franks as the victims of the Crusades. And yet, scholars like Leila Norako and Jeremy J. Cohen have shown how later Europeans did perceive the repeated failure of Crusades as a blow against them and against Christianity, even though it was in the past, and how that loss did shape literary expressions of fear and anxiety directed at Muslims. It feels weird and wrong to place this kind of inherited trauma next to, say, the twelfth and thirteenth century Jewish memorialization of the pogroms against them by Crusaders.

But I think it needs to be done, albeit carefully and with much attention to the so-called "history of emotions" that historicizes both feelings and ways that people expressed different feelings. (The uses of fear as motivation in sermons, for example). And here's why: AskHistorians, as you know, OP, is obsessed with ancient and medieval soldiers expressing PTSD. But...you know...what about the civilians whose families they killed, homes they burned, what about the women they raped and the children they enslaved?

I think trauma is a useful angle for moving "historical memory" from an abstract concept into the lived experiences of people. And with attention to broader contexts of oppressors and oppressed, it can be a way to explore the ramifications of an event or activity (a particular massacre; the general mode of medieval warfare) in multiple directions, rather than (e.g.) focusing JUST on the crusaders or JUST on the Jews of the Rhineland.

Trauma studies as they goes along with the history of emotions crowd in medieval literature is fairly new/understudied, but it's out there, and most of my colleagues have the sense that it's a promising place to start building a career--I've even had a few professors pushing me and other students in that direction.

From what I've seen, a lot of trauma studies in medieval lit come packaged under postcolonial theory. This comes up a good bit in Welsh literature, and you don't have to think hard about why. Peredur, the Welsh version of the more famous Arthurian romance Perceval le Gallois of Chretien de Troyes, can be read as dealing with this. One excellent reading (I want to say in Arthur of the Welsh, but I'll see if I can dig the essay up) points out that what we see in the Welsh romance is an inability to return to the pre-Norman, pre-colonial past. The story starts with a tiny community of Welsh people, including Peredur's mother, who took her child away to a peaceful community hidden in the mountains, where he'll (ideally) never learn the first thing about knights and all that nonsense. It backfires spectacularly, and soon young Peredur takes some branches symbolically significant in Welsh tradition and weaves them into what looks a lot like Norman armor. There's a yearning to look back to that mythic, maybe imaginary realm the bards sung about, but short of hiding in Snowdonia, the text argues that there's no going back to that, and the weeping mother has to watch her son march off to face the Normanized present.

Since J.J. Cohen was mentioned, he does the same thing with Gerald of Wales in Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain, where he argues that Gerald's own callous, imperial attitude toward the Irish on the expedition through Ireland comes from a place of deep self-hatred as a half-Welsh subject. He aggressively ignores his own identity and takes it out on the monstrous Others across the Irish sea, and his vivid descriptions of the monsters and mutants he supposedly encounters over there are an expression of his obsession of his own self, which he probably sees as being as monstrous as the hooved man or bearded ladies he describes. I'm not totally convinced, because Gerry is an extraordinarily bitter man in general and that's closer to psychoanalysis than I'd like, but the bigger picture of the book's whole argument is worth a read.

Even outside the postcolonial sphere, we definitely have the sense that trauma needs to be addressed. In an undergrad lecture introducing us to Chaucer's world, it was hammered into us that we needed to read everything in the class knowing that the Black Plague had just swept through Britain. You can see it in Chaucer pretty clearly. House of Fame is a half-serious spoof on Dante wherein the Chaucer-persona gets flown up to a mountain made of ice, where all the words spoken in the world sail up to the peak through the halls of Fame, and names are written in the ice, but they melt as the sun touches them at the height of their notoriety. Book of the Duchess climaxes with the Chaucer-persona more or less taking a mourning knight by the shoulders and crying "Your wife is dead, dude, you need to pull yourself together!" in an act that shakes the dreamy setting back into reality. This, on the heels of an epidemic that eliminated a third to a half of everyone you were acquainted with. It was a fundamental shaking of everything that held medieval literary thought together. "This life is just temporal, we are made for eternity" is an idea that worked through the earlier centuries, but it gets shaken severely by the cataclysm of the Plague.

Here's the problem though: trauma we read through a medieval manuscript can't mean the same thing as what we think of in our extremely literate society. When we read these manuscripts, we can't lose sight of the fact that these items--both text and physical material--are products of by and for an economic elite, by and large. John Gower represents groundbreaking achievements in multilingual poetry, but you can't get away from the fact that the man was a fabulously rich lawyer who explicitly pushed back against the expressions of dissent he saw in populist movements like the Great Rising. These events were constantly politicized; you can read Brut chronicles that spin the events of the Rising to change the grievances of the participants depending on what noble house was in power at the time and how they wanted to present themselves. You see the same thing in Wyclif's teaching. One generation, he's an Oxford academic serving the nobility, and two generations later, the Lollards have made him a populist hero, an intellectual giant to express and validate their grievances.

One interesting (debatable) exception is Thomas Hoccleve, the very chatty Lancastrian bureaucrat and poet/propagandist. He comes a generation after Chaucer, and he's very interesting to emotion historians because he writes one of the earliest autobiographical accounts of a severe mental breakdown. He talks about a madness that overtook him and rendered him useless for a long period of time, and he talks about profound alienation afterward, when he tries to come back to work and gets met with suspicion, all of his friends driven off and worried he'll relapse. But as is always the case, it's a lot more interesting to look further into him. He also writes a seemingly didactic poem called Address to John Oldcaslte. Oldcastle was in open rebellion against Henry V after being charged as a Lollard heretic, and Hoccleve writes the Address while he's at large. It's usually read as a heavy-handed moralization about how heresy is bad, but I think there's a deeper appeal to friendship in the poem. Henry V and John were former war buddies, and Henry really drags his heels in prosecuting Oldcastle. I think Hoccleve urges Oldcastle to turn himself in while he's got the chance and remember the friendship between him and the king, partly because few authors at the time know just what it's like to be deserted by friends like Hoccleve does. Oldcastle comes a generation after the infamous Lollard Knights, heretic-sympathizers who were helpful to Archbishop Arundel in sparking a medieval "red scare" for heretics, creating a downright hostile, censor-happy literary environment. In part, Hoccleve can be read as desperately trying to recover what he can in the old social order he was promised by the likes of Chaucer in the middle of a really impossible situation of being a Lancastrian court poet--no wonder the guy had a nervous breakdown.

All that to give you an idea of where trauma studies are at among medieval lit folks--I presented those ideas at a conference, and some Hoccleve scholars told me it was a fresh take. So we have to read cultural, generational trauma in their political environments, which is on the upswing with the recent surge of codicology/manuscript studies. This is something I'm just now diving into properly, which is why I can't offer an answer that's more on-point to your question, but I hope that helps a little!

If it's ok I'd like to tag /u/Snapshot52 here because this post immediately came to mind when reading this question. I'd be interested in reading more on their experience with intergenerational trauma from within the space of the Indigenous approach described in that MM thread as well as from without.