EVEN IN the twenty-first century, war is a gendered concept. Many millions of both sexes have been the victims of war in just the last hundred years, yet the image that perhaps most powerfully haunts the collective imagination is that of the millions of young men who fought and died in the battlefields of France and Belgium. That haunting is reflected in the extraordinary success of novels such as Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy or Sebastian Faulkes' Birdsong. Those most vividly remembered are the men distinguished by having made the choice to fight, and hence to enter the sphere of heroism. Until very recently, that choice was exclusively open to men, and the idea of war has thus necessarily engaged a set of conventional gender stereotypes throughout the history of western thought and writing: the lines quoted above might as easily refer to the Middle Ages as to the early twentieth century.

The world of medieval warfare – battle, arms, the tournament, jousting – was undoubtedly a world of men, one of the interconnected public spheres of medieval society, which found their opposites in the private and domestic spheres inhabited by the lady – the bedroom, the castle, the garden.