Keeping track of war memories
Peter the Hermit - a key figure during the First Crusade.
Modern warfare has little in common with medieval campaigns such as the Crusades. But although wars of different eras vary greatly in terms of their execution, purpose and place in culture, historical studies show that human responses to military conflicts remain strikingly similar.
In her research into 13th-century Crusades, Dr Megan Cassidy-Welch, a medievalist in Monash University’s School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, has found persistent themes in such things as how society regards returned soldiers, our need to justify killing, how we cope with the traumatic aftermath of wars, and how we remember or commemorate those wars.
“We think modernity is unique in all sorts of ways, but for hundreds of years people have been thinking about the same sort of things and having the same sort of experiences,” Dr Cassidy-Welch said.
In research that has won the support of the Australian Research Council, which awarded Dr Cassidy-Welch a four-year Future Fellowship, she is investigating aspects of a series of crusades that took place from about 1215 to 1250.
Although in modern times war is acknowledged as having a significant role in the shaping of national identity, the Crusades – holy wars fought both inside and outside medieval Europe – took place long before the concept of nation states.
“But a number of other things that have made modern war memory important existed then,” Dr Cassidy-Welch said.
“For instance, the authority of the person who was actually standing there at the time: their voices, their memories, their views seem to have been privileged as important ones, just as veterans of modern war have a privileged voice of experience.”
Her research in European archives has turned up letters that soldiers sent home, along with wills and last testaments whose preambles – written by men severely injured in battle – sometimes give “a glimpse of the ways they are trying to manage their own memories once they are gone”.
The glorious soldier has a place only in formal histories.
“At moments when people start to try to make sense of their experience and how it should be remembered, it’s much more complex: it’s about fear and anxiety and difficulty and trauma and drama and feelings of estrangement,” Dr Cassidy-Welch said.
Where battles took place often shapes the memories of them – just as our understanding of the Anzac tradition is closely linked to Gallipoli – and Dr Cassidy-Welch has also found evidence of something we think of as purely modern: battlefield tourism.
“Those forms of remembering war were active even then,” Dr Cassidy-Welch said.
Dr Cassidy-Welch is planning a book about her work, to be called Remembrance Projects: War Memory and the 13th Century Crusades.