Combat Stress in Pre-modern Europe

Owen Rees is Associate Lecturer in Ancient History at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. An ancient Greek historian with a recognized expertise in the historiographical debate surrounding ancient post-traumatic stress disorder, he has published widely on ancient Greek socio-military history and the medical humanities.Kathryn Hurlock is Reader in Medieval History at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. She is co-ordinator of the Returning Soldier Network, a collaborative network examining the figure of the returning soldier or veteran from the ancient world to the modern day. Kathryn has published widely on the crusades, including two monographs on aspects of British crusading.Jason Crowley is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK, where he specialises in the psychology of combat and combat motivations. As a comparative historian, he works with theories and evidence generated by the experience of modern warfare, but his main focus is on the citizens of Classical Athens who served as hoplites, heavy-infantrymen, during the wars of the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

• Chapter 1: Combat Trauma in Pre-Modern Europe: An Introduction.- Chapter 2: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: An ancient Greek case study in retrospective diagnosis.- Chapter 3: A collective war trauma in Classical Athens? Coping with the human cost of warfare in Aeschylus' Persians.- Chapter 4: Combat Trauma and Ajax: A Script-based Approach.- Chapter 5: Legal evidence for Roman PTSD?.- Chapter 6: Terrible but Unavoidable? Combat trauma and a change to legal proscriptions on Roman military suicide under Hadrian.- Chapter 7: Was there Combat Trauma in the Middle Ages? A Case for Moral Injury in Pre-Modern Conflict.- Chapter 8: Fear and Loathing in Eyrbyggja Saga: Combat Trauma in Medieval Iceland.- Chapter 9: Understandings of adversity and resilience amongst women and children during the seventeenth-century British Civil Wars.

“The collection is well organised with sets of chapters using similar types of sources and studying similar eras, making for an engaging discussion about a complex topic. … By connecting new and fascinating research over an expansive timescale, Combat Stress in Pre-modern Europe makes a uniquely valuable contribution to the historical study of war trauma.” (Matthew Barrett, Canadian Military History, Vol. 33 (2), 2024)