‘Je Hé Guerre, Point Ne La Doy Prisier’: Peace and the Emotions of War in the Prison Poetry of Charles d’Orléans

Abstract

The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat, Victoria, was opened in 2004 to commemorate more than 36,000 Australian prisoners taken during the Boer War, First and Second World Wars, and the Korean War. Its design included an inscribed granite slab and a pool of water in acknowledgement of ‘the pain and suffering of those that returned and those that remain on foreign shores’ and to remember ‘those men and women who, while captured, suffered appalling hardship and horrendous atrocities but maintained their dignity, courage and mateship’. 1 In the later medieval period that this essay considers, the experience of those captured in conflict was less likely to reach the levels of human suffering recalled at the Ballarat memorial. Most combatants overcome would be killed where they stood on the battleground, and only those of high social status would be taken prisoner. These men were valuable assets, and it was rarely in the best interest of the enemy to treat them poorly: they were worth more alive. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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