![]() The book opens with a coherent and extensive ‘Introduction’ which both lays out the intended goals of the work, and the sources the author will be engaging with. Nonetheless, one needs to consider that Różycki has published extensively on the Roman and Byzantine theory of warfare, showing a particular focus on military treatises of the sixth century. ![]() Therefore, he is to be praised for his courage in tackling a topic as complex and as challenging as this, considering both the paucity and the imbalance in the focus (looking at things from the perspective of the ‘military elite’ rather than from the ‘humble’ soldier) of the primary narrative sources for the period in question (fifth to ninth centuries, but focusing on the sixth century). ![]() Różycki’s stated aim is to follow in the footsteps of Keegan (and others that came after him) and to shed light on the various battlefield emotions of Roman soldiers in Late Antiquity, and the methods employed to harness them. And it was in breaking this ‘taboo’ that military historians owe immense gratitude to John Keegan who, in his 1976 classic The Face of Battle, looked at the direct experience of individuals in three major encounters of the last 600 years: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815) and the Somme (1916) at ‘the point of maximum danger’. What would have been running through the combatants’ minds? What gave them the confidence to risk their lives in the fray? What was their motivation that suppressed their primal instinct of running away from danger? Was it for money or fame that they principally fought, in the name of God or one’s king, or (more probably) was it a combination of all of these things? The issue of battlefield emotions, including fear and post-traumatic stress, has been hugely neglected to the point of being considered a ‘taboo’ up to the very end of the twentieth century. One of the toughest challenges involved in writing about medieval warfare is that of describing what battle in that period was like: how it might have felt to be there, including not just the physical sensations but also the psychological and emotional. Łukasz Różycki Battlefield Emotions in Late Antiquity: A Study of Fear and Motivation in Roman Military Treatises (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 333 pp.
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