Arms or the Man I: Gunpowder Technology and the Early Modern Romance1

This essay places the chivalric romance, both as a print and performance genre, "under the shadow" of Renaissance England's contemporaneous gunpowder revolution. Only in exposing the sway of artillery on the long sixteenth century can we grasp how the romance was circumscribing, exorcising, and sometimes even wittingly censoring that technology's presence. Authors who were penning, and tournament participants who were acting out, the romances—Philip Sidney among them—were defending a social terrain that gunpowder was rendering obsolete. By additionally placing the romances beside pamphlets written by actual soldiers—some who criticized Sidney outright—a more complicated and fretful picture emerges vis-à-vis the sixteenth-century nexus of literature, technology, and society.