The Chivalric Ethos And The Development Of Military Professionalism

This volume probes the meaning and significance of military 'professionalism'; considers whether it required the waning of the chivalric ethos or merely resulted in it; and assesses the influence of both value systems on the rise of Western states.

These essays honor Dennis Showalter, a pioneer in the field of military history. Written by some of the most highly-respected scholars in the field, they cover a wide range of topics from the ancient world to the present day.

This book examines literary depictions of the construction and destruction of the armored male body in combat in relation to early modern English understandings of the past. Bringing together the fields of material culture and militarism, Susan Harlan argues that the notion of “spoiling” – or the sanctioned theft of the arms and armor of the vanquished in battle – provides a way of thinking about England’s relationship to its violent cultural inheritance. She demonstrates how writers reconstituted the spoils of antiquity and the Middle Ages in an imagined military struggle between male bodies. An analysis of scenes of arming and disarming across texts by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and tributes to Sir Philip Sidney reveals a pervasive militant nostalgia: a cultural fascination with moribund models and technologies of war. Readers will not only gain a better understanding of humanism but also a new way of thinking about violence and cultural production in Renaissance England.

The period 1350–1750 saw major developments in European warfare, which not only had a huge impact on the way wars were fought, but also are critical to long-standing controversies about state development, the global ascendancy of the West, and the nature of 'military revolutions' past and present. However, the military history of this period is usually written from either medieval or early-modern, and either Western or Eastern European, perspectives. These chronological and geographical limits have produced substantial confusion about how the conduct of war changed. The essays in this book provide a comprehensive overview of land and sea warfare across Europe throughout this period of momentous political, religious, technological, intellectual and military change. Written by leading experts in their fields, they not only summarise existing scholarship, but also present new findings and new ideas, casting new light on the art of war, the rise of the state, and European expansion.

The reign of Henry VIII saw a renascent militarism encapture England. Memories of great victories over the French remained fresh and resplendent in the psyche and pageantry of early-Tudor England, and the pursuit of glory on the battlefield and of due recognition of England as a major player in European power politics were the identifying features of Henry's reign. In an exciting new work, James Raymond traces the development of Henry's military establishment within the context of the wider European military revolution. Making use of extensive new research into the military literature of the mid-Tudor period, 'Henry VIII's Military Revolution' is able to root firmly the military theories of the time within the solid realities of Henry's army. Raymond pays particular attention to the rise of professionalism in the English military, and its adaptation to new technologies and ideas. In this vein, the career of Sir Christopher Morris, Henry's first professional artilleryman, is explored for the first time, casting light on the experience of day-to-day life in the English army of mid-Tudor England, and challenging the established view on the development of artillery both in England and in Europe. "Henry VIII's Military Revolution" develops and expands the argument that the English Army was up-to-date with its European contemporaries, and moves the English experience away from the periphery towards the centre of the debate on the European military revolution. The militarism of Henry VIII's England is seen through new eyes in this fascinating new work.

Craig Taylor's study examines the wide-ranging French debates on the martial ideals of chivalry and knighthood during the period of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453). Faced by stunning military disasters and the collapse of public order, writers and intellectuals carefully scrutinized the martial qualities expected of knights and soldiers. They questioned when knights and men-at-arms could legitimately resort to violence, the true nature of courage, the importance of mercy, and the role of books and scholarly learning in the very practical world of military men. Contributors to these discussions included some of the most famous French medieval writers, led by Jean Froissart, Geoffroi de Charny, Philippe de Mézières, Honorat Bovet, Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier and Antoine de La Sale. This interdisciplinary study sets their discussions in context, challenging modern, romantic assumptions about chivalry and investigating the historical reality of debates about knighthood and warfare in late medieval France.

Definitive account of the English garrison at Calais - the largest contemporary force in Europe - in the wider context of European warfare in the middle ages.

Bringing to bear her extensive knowledge of the cultures of Renaissance Europe and sixteenth-century Mexico, M?a Dom?uez Torres here investigates the significance of military images and symbols in post-Conquest Mexico. She shows how the 'conquest' in fact involved dynamic exchanges between cultures; and that certain interconnections between martial, social and religious elements resonated with similar intensity among Mesoamericans and Europeans, creating indeed cultural bridges between these diverse communities. Multidisciplinary in approach, this study builds on scholarship in the fields of visual, literary and cultural studies to analyse the European and Mesoamerican content of the martial imagery fostered within the indigenous settlements of central Mexico, as well as the ways in which local communities and leaders appropriated, manipulated, modified and reinterpreted foreign visual codes. Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico draws on post-structuralist and post-colonial approaches to analyse the complex dynamics of identity formation in colonial communities.