Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, and: Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History, and Identity, 1450-1600 (review)

Writing War contains the proceedings of the conference "War: Medieval and Renaissance Responses," sponsored by the University of Durham Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in 2001. Properly editing such volumes is a demanding job, and the editors of this volume should be commended for their clear, essential introductory essay. The book's eleven articles examine various aspects of warfare literature in northern Europe during the Middle Ages; the Mediterranean world and Eastern Europe being conspicuously absent.

Writing reviews of collected essays is usually tougher than reviewing monographs, as team productions nearly always turn out as something akin to a curate's egg. However, the quality of this volume's essays is invariably good, and in some cases excellent. This reviewer found particularly interesting W. H. Jackson's article on Rudolf von Ems, and K. S. Whetter's "Warfare and Combat in Le Morte Darthur." Possibly the weakest works (albeit in a very relative sense) are Helen Cooper's "Speaking for the Victim," and Christopher Allmand's essay on Vegetius. Yet Allmand honestly recognizes (p. 26) that his is a "book-size subject," not appropriate for a short article. Overall, whilst Writing War is more a cultural historian's cup of tea, it contains many threads and ideas that some of the more sophisticated military historians (even those not particularly interested in the Middle Ages) may wish to explore, and by and large delivers the goods it promises.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Harari's Renaissance Military Memoirs, a shoddy, incomplete, and historically anachronistic work. At every page one can hear the groan of the felled trees. For one, the book's title is misleading. The term Renaissance does not just indicate a historical period (circa 1350–1650), but, more important, one characterized by the "rebirth" of classical culture in opposition to the "Medieval." This phenomenon affected every European country at different stages but the author appears to be cheerfully oblivious of this, overtly implying that everyone from the fourteenth century chronicler Jehan de Froissart to the sixteenth century memoir writer Götz von Berlichingen had the same approach to history (see, for instance, p. 179). Also, despite the fact of the Renaissance's intimate association with Italy, the author excludes Italian military memoirs on the astounding pretext that they come "from a very different milieu compared with the trans-alpine ones" (p. 4, note 16). Basing himself on C. Bec's limited and outdated Les marchands écrivains à Florence, 1375–1434: affaires et humanisme (1967), Harari goes on to state that: "a Florentine merchant or tradesman who saw some military service in Florence's army would display different views on war, service and honor than the memoirs of French and Spanish warrior noblemen." Whoa—wait a second: has Harari never heard of Benedetto Varchi? In any case, in Italy there was an abundance of noblemen who made war their lifestyle, as explained in Michael Mallett's Mercenaries and their Masters (1974) (curiously absent—like many other important studies on Renaissance warfare—from Harari's bibliography). Many, like Francesco Balbi di Correggio—an Italian, despite the fact that he wrote in Spanish—left written memoirs, as becomes clear by perusing Mario d'Ayala's Bibliografia Militare Italiana (Turin, 1854—another source ignored by the author), quite a few of them covering similar themes to those of their French and Spanish colleagues.

For the rest, Harari travels through his "Renaissance" sources as wide-eyed as Candide, botching things up even more by his flawed comparisons with more recent military memoirs. On more than one occasion he is astonished that warriors...