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  • Living by the Sword: Weapons and Material Culture in France and England, 600–1600 by Kristen B. Neuschel
  • Nicholas Utzig
Kristen B. Neuschel, Living by the Sword: Weapons and Material Culture in France and England, 600–1600 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), xvi + 223 pp.

Still startled from his encounter with the ghost, Hamlet demands that Horatio and Marcellus keep secret what they have seen. "Swear by my sword," Hamlet implores, extending the weapon to his companions (1.5.154). The sword's simple cruciform shape augments its primary function, transforming a personal weapon into a ready-made devotional object, something suitable for adding weight to an oath. With the ghost still clamoring under the stage—"Swear by his sword," he cries!—the naked sword itself seems the least remarkable of all of the scene's stage properties (160). No one, to my knowledge, has ever remarked on the fact that Hamlet has a sword at this moment. He is, in a way, expected to have one about his person. But this otherwise unremarkable object transforms in this moment, becoming not a sword, but the sword, the sword on which Hamlet and his [End Page 277] comrades swear. This is the moment when Hamlet commits to his revenge, when he resolves to put on his antic disposition. The sword becomes the material residue of a dramatic event. It has a history. It means something.

Kristen Neuschel's latest book tackles this very phenomenon, examining the ways in which swords become entangled with meaning over a thousand-year period in England and France. From the early Middle Ages to the advent of the seventeenth century, Living by the Sword cuts through a broad swath of history, and such a scope is necessary for a project that charts how swords were understood over time. Swords rank among both the most significant and least noteworthy objects in this period, from King Arthur's legendary Excalibur to a gentleman's everyday accessory. Neuschel's account is less concerned with the material facts of swords—with how they were produced and employed—than with how they were understood by the people of their time, with understanding "the interpretative strategies and categories of experience available to their human owners" (16). Many of the swords in this book witnessed the beginning of what military historians sometimes call "the military revolution," a period during which innovations in military technology (e.g. the trace italienne fortress, gunpowder) spurred greater centralization of political authority and demanded changes in tactics, strategy, logistics, and administration. Neuschel's focus moves the other way. Instead of states and armies, Neuschel examines the object most closely associated with warfighters and charts how "the 'modernization' of warfare and of warrior identity was a profoundly cultural process, as well as being a political, social, economic and technological one" (20).

Living by the Sword begins in England before the Norman Conquest, moving from the literary world of Beowulf and the Old English fragment "The Battle of Maldon" to the material traces from burial sites and legal documentation captured in wills. Literary evidence, a written legacy that has preserved older oral cultural traditions, is just as important to Neuschel as the material. "Swords are the connective tissue that do the work of linking the two worlds," the world of Beowulf and Beowulf, of the distant literary past and the poet's material present (56). In pre-Conquest literature, Neuschel finds that a sword's history—both the stories told about it and its actual past—are often more important than its material characteristics. A good blade may be rare, but a good story makes a sword unique. Swords in Beowulf and "Maldon" point to an investment in tying this particular kind of weapon to specific cultural practices. Warriors' exploits, real and literary, both make a sword's history and their own.

As time went on, the cultural importance of swords became tied to more than battlefield functions or heroic exploits. Due in no small part to an enduring tournament culture in the late Middle Ages, men's fashion became militarized, a trend that helped shape the way personal weapons were worn and adorned. By the seventeenth...

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