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

ARMS AND LETTERS ARE A COMMON THEME in early modern Spanish literature and one that many scholars have explored. This exploration, however, has concentrated on the most admired and canonical authors (such as Garcilaso, Ercilla, and Cervantes) or on select military figures (such as Cortés, Díaz del Castillo, and Cabeza de Vaca) who may be less consistently admired but whose renderings of their own histories have also become canonical. Miguel Martínez, with his broad-ranging study of writings by soldiers, has brought into the discussion an array of texts that enhance and complicate our understanding of the relationship between writing and soldiering. Ercilla figures prominently, to be sure, as do some other familiar figures, but also included are those whose voices we seldom hear or have never heard, for Martínez discusses several unpublished documents. He describes his book as "a cultural history of Spain's imperial wars as told by the common men who fought them" (2). The image that emerges of those wars is compelling, personal, and often unsettling for the empire. Just as in Don Quijote's speech on arms and letters, what comes through is the drudgery and horror of modern warfare—especially as it was waged by those following orders—rather than the chivalric ideal that was used to justify violent expansion in the first place.

Martínez argues that common soldiers influenced Spanish literary culture with their innovations in genres such as epic and lyric poetry and with new perspectives that challenged prevailing notions of veracity in historical writing. He also shows that their accounts of the grim reality of war and its aftermath undermined triumphalist narratives and, at times, even questioned the legitimacy of imperial aggression. Through extensive archival work and insightful readings of various types of writing by soldiers, Martínez is also challenging certain prevailing ideas, both those of conservative scholars who celebrate Spain's imperial past and those of progressive scholars who strive to move beyond canonical texts but often ignore the key role that war played in early modern culture.

In chapter 1, "The Soldiers' Republic of Letters," Martínez shows that soldiers read and wrote more than the general civilian population did, and he argues that various kinds of writing formed an essential component of the structure of military society, even at the lowest ranks. From his descriptions of soldierly writing, one gets the impression of a continuum that ranges from the use of written communication as a basic tool of military life to testimonies as proof of honorable service to a keen interest in works like La Araucana, which was widely read by soldiers in spite of its high cost. One also, along the way, sees Martínez justify the main title of his book, for, although he acknowledges that soldiers who depict themselves as writing on campaign, near the front, and at the edges of empire were deploying a conventional rhetorical strategy to enhance their authority, he maintains that this scenario was more than a fanciful motif. A substantial amount of writing was done on or near the front.

In chapter 2, "The Truth about War," Martínez contrasts soldiers' writings with Italian epic poems, Spanish books of chivalry, and even less escapist literature, such as Castiglione's Book of the Courtier. Here he builds on Michael Murrin's History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (U of Chicago P, 1994), from which he adopts the fitting label "gunpowder epic," which refers to works that break away from chivalric fiction not only in their concern for historical accuracy but also in their focus on the role of common soldiers, on modern weapons and tactics, and on some of the more gruesome and less glamorous realities of modern warfare, which was increasingly waged on a massive scale. Martínez examines the works of Jerónimo Sempere, Baltasar del Hierro, and Juan Rufo, among others, as well as the most famous example of Alonso de...