This book details the warrior pursuits of provincial nobles living (and fighting) in the Southern French provinces of Guyenne and Languedoc between 1598 and 1635. A “cultural exploration of violence” (xxvii), the book's reflection is in three sections, which explore the profession of arms, bonds of nobility, and, echoing the work of Arlette Jouanna, the existence of a culture of revolt. Chapter 1 refines further who these warrior nobles were — a “social group,” but not a “social class” (15); underlines some methodological problems (especially the piecemeal and politically-inflected nature of contemporary documents); and offers a general survey of the noble warrior families in the two provinces, with particular attention paid to the divisions between Catholics and Calvinists. Chapter 2 focuses on questions of noble kinship, in particular how families crafted their identities within noble culture. Recourse to Pierre Bourdieu allows for rich and nuanced discussion of the flexibility of kinship practices. Chapter 3 looks at how warrior nobles earned money and managed their fortunes, underscoring the sometimes “capitalistic” nature (53) of such enterprises. Part 1 succeeds in focusing less on arms than on the wider culture that perhaps made weapons necessary: a divided political landscape, intense construction of noble identities, and family rivalries grounded in capitalistic competition. Part 2, on bonds of nobility, begins with chapter 4, which details how clientage and friendship connections were both informed by and an influence upon warfare. Chapter 5 claims to focus on how “officeholding framed the political activities of warrior nobles” (115) and, questioning Habermas's notion that a public sphere only appears in the late seventeenth-century, gives a careful analysis of how on the one hand officeholders were responsible for “the maintenance of the king's authority” (119) while also needing to “establish [their own] authority” (120). Chapter 6 turns its attention to the question of honor, divided into four categories (sanctity, quality, reputation, precedence), which are perhaps too general to be of much use, leading to statements like “Huguenot nobles . . . associated sanctity honor with righteousness, believing themselves members of the elect” (154). Part 3 deals with the culture of revolt, which signals a turn towards the more military aspects of warrior pursuits. Chapter 7 details rituals of arming, developing Arlette Jouanna's Le Devoir de révolte (1989), to show how “nobles instigated and justified their participation in violence” (221). Chapter 8 asks how warrior nobles organized (sometimes quite large) personal armies and chapter 9 looks at various aspects of “violence performances” (253), studying issues such as raiding, sieges, and battle, as well as the role of religious conviction in such warfare.

What to make of this book? At one point, Sandberg notes that historians “often merely follow the route of the king's personal field army and gaze simply from the monarchic perspective on civil conflict” (254), something he strives to change with this study. The author portrays well the structures and systems by which warrior nobles found and gave meaning to their pursuits, much more than he depicts warfare itself — indeed, there is relatively little blood in this book. For a study so focused on two specific areas of France, it does not spend much time on differentiating these areas from the rest of France, nor on the specifics of individual families or conflicts: there are many generalizing references to “warrior nobles” (154, 215, 254, 255, 268, etc.) or “noble officers” (239) or “nobles” (173, 214) or “southern French nobles” (286) or to “Early modern French monarchs” (198), or else anonymous mention of “one of the prominent nobles of Périgord” (223) or to “a Languedoc noble” (254), etc. This reviewer sometimes felt that the attempt to paint a general picture of the regions ignored the very regional specificity it purported to study, with proper names and specific instances of warfare often mentioned only in passing, soon to be lost in the general narrative. Still, Sandberg's solid study certainly complements the work of Arlette Jouanna and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and should be welcomed and praised for offering English-speakers a (rather rare) glimpse of Renaissance Languedoc and Guyenne.