In 1188, an eye-catching display of royal anger resulted in the destruction of the ancient elm tree at Gisors by Philip II of France. Building on recent reappraisals of anger and other emotions in the medieval context, this essay seeks to understand how contemporary observers may have interpreted their monarch's momentous outburst. The elm's longstanding significance as a site of diplomacy and peace negotiations in the border zone between France and Normandy makes its downfall especially symbolic, and suggests that the deliberate display of emotional excess may be an under-appreciated factor in the history of medieval diplomatic encounters. Examining chronicle sources and later literary renditions of the incident, retold from both French and an Anglo-Norman perspectives, the article reveals how medieval commentators made use of a rich emotional vocabulary in order either to celebrate or to deplore Philip's act of arboricide.
It is often argued that a shared culture, or at least shared cultural references or practices, can help to foster peace and prevent war. This essay examines in detail and criticizes one such argument, made by Patrick Leigh Fermor, in the context of his discussing an incident during World War II, when he and a captured German general found a form of agreement, a ground for peace between them, in their both knowing Horace's ode I.9 by heart in Latin. By way of introducing the sixth and final installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” this essay proposes that Leigh Fermor's narrative be understood in terms of commerce, rather than consensus. It concludes by examining Ezra Pound's use of the word commerce in his poem “A Pact” (“Let there be commerce between us”) to define his relationship with his “detested” and “pig-headed” poetic “father,” Walt Whitman.
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