Under Siege: Perpetual Warfare and Late-Medieval Literature

An image of a male figure crouched with a book between the stacks of a library — Daniel Davies, photograph courtesy of Wayne Thomas, University of Houston College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

Daniel Davies

Solmsen Fellow (2024-2025)

Assistant Professor, English, University of Houston

Under Siege: Perpetual Warfare and Late-Medieval Literature

Under Siege is an account of how late-medieval England’s conflicts with France and Scotland created a culture of perpetual warfare. Reading across literary, historical, philosophical, and archival sources, the project makes three interventions. First, it demonstrates how literary works shape conceptions of war, extending scholarship on late-medieval war writing. Second, it focuses on England’s imperial ambitions rather than individual conflicts to show how insular dominance and continental expansion intersect. Third, it argues that late-medieval perpetual warfare reflects the place of war in society today, challenging accounts that propose an epistemic break between medieval and modern warfare.

Daniel Davies is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston, where his research centers on late-medieval literary and historical writing. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 and his research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Strarthmatine Trust. With R.D. Perry he is co-editor of Literatures of the Hundred Years, available Open Access from Manchester University Press.

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