Front Lines: Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World by Miguel Martínez (review)

In Front Lines: Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World, Miguel Martínez casts new light on the practice of soldiers' writing in Renaissance Spain. Focusing on a hitherto unacknowledged group of authors—the common soldiers of Spain's imperial armies—this book exposes the dynamics of what Martínez calls "a soldierly republic of letters." The result is something rare in early modern studies: "a critical view from below on state violence and imperial expansionism" (1). In a variety of genres, the rank-and-file soldiers of the Spanish empire offered literary representations of the wars in which they were fighting. In doing so, these men not only became part of a literary universe, but they also reshaped it and in some cases even transformed its standards. The book thus traces the interaction between imperial warfare and literary culture, seen from the new perspective of the soldado curioso.

What makes Martínez's approach to the theme of the pen and the sword in the Spanish Golden Age innovative is his focus on the material relationship between the practices of warfare and writing. He considers not only the works produced by these soldiers but also the consumption and especially the dissemination of literature among Spain's military troops. This interest in the written word as a material object leads to a nuanced view of the socio-cultural history of the early modern Hispanic world. Martínez draws on James Amelang's use of the myth of Icarus to explain the unexpected and subversive authorship of artisans in early modern Europe (cf. The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998). Like Amelang's artisans, the Spanish soldiers Martínez studies engaged in a similarly dissident form of authorship.

The book is divided into five chapters, which seek to offer an overall picture of the varied genres (epic, lyric, and autobiographical modes) and rhetorical strategies Spain's early modern soldiers made use of to express not only their experiences but also their criticism. In the first chapter ("The Soldiers' Republic of Letters") Martínez reveals how much the written word permeated the daily life of Spain's military men. Through a selection of anecdotes, he shows the omnipresence of literacy in the army and writing on the battlefield and draws attention to how texts traveled across the empire. His chosen examples suggest the subversive potential of public discourse and this preliminary chapter offers the required background to understand the dynamics of soldierly writing explored in the following chapters.

In chapter two ("The Truth About War"), we see how Spanish soldiers revolutionized the epic genre by developing a "gunpowder poetics," which emphasized the use of fire arms in warfare. Martínez convincingly demonstrates that the heroic discourse of these soldiers targeted a different public from that of the noble romanzo, the chivalric romance of Ariosto. At the same time, many of these gunpowder epics make truth claims that place their works in direct contrast to chivalric fiction, which "praised the wrong heroes at the expense of the true ones" (81). By drawing attention to these different goals and different publics, Martínez corrects the critical tendency to lump together as "Caroleidas" (epic poems related to the reign of Charles V) works as distinct as Luis Zapata's Carlo Famoso, Jerónimo Sempere's Carolea and Jerónimo Jiménez de Urrea's Carlos Quinto Victorioso. Whereas Zapata's work adheres to the traditions of the romanzo, the latter two poets reject the use of chivalric fictions and claim authority as eyewitnesses to the harshness of modern warfare.

The third chapter ("Rebellion, Captivity, and Survival") focuses on the perspectives of these eyewitnesses and the ways in which they exploited this new form of epic poetry to convey disillusion and criticism. The key authors of this part, Baltasar del Hierro and Alonso de Salamanca...