Sutton, John William

John William Sutton earned his Ph.D. in English from The University of Rochester and has taught at Rochester, SUNY Geneseo, SUNY Brockport, and Monroe Community College. In addition to his work on martial death scenes in medieval English literature, Dr. Sutton has also published on Middle English wisdom literature and adaptations of Beowulf in contemporary popular culture.

Death and Violence in Old and Middle English Literature

2007 0-7734-5469-1
Explores how medieval English authors used the spectacle of a character’s death to express their views about the martial culture of their aristocratic countrymen. The argument is set forth that authorial attitudes toward the warrior ethos evolved from respect or even veneration during the Anglo-Saxon period to condemnation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when, after hundreds of years of incessant warfare, writers came to see this ethos as little more than a system of institutionalized violence. Given the texts it considers, this book should appeal particularly to Anglo-Saxonists and Arthurianists, as well as to scholars of war in the Middles Ages and to gender theorists who study medieval conceptions of masculinity.