In addition to numerous studies of individual wars, battles, and generals, the field of early modern military history has been particularly enlivened in the past half century by the so-called military-revolution debate, a scholarly discussion of the grand technological, tactical, political, and economic developments that transformed warfare, and as a result perhaps the state itself, between roughly the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The lives and experiences of early modern soldiers, on the contrary, have enjoyed far less scholarly attention, with only a handful of works on this important topic appearing in recent years. This volume aims to address this lacuna, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of historians and literary scholars to explore what it meant to be a solider in the early modern British Isles, how one learned what it meant to be a good solider, how fighting men were perceived, and how they were represented.
After an introduction by Matthew Woodcock, the volume begins with a section dedicated to how military identities were understood and constructed. D. J. R. Trim's insightful chapter focuses on the close ties between martial and masculine identity, and explores the performative nature of early modern military honor. Woodcock's chapter then points to the ways in which early modern English military identity could be and was modeled on authoritative classical examples, especially that of Julius Caesar, a man adept at both sword and pen. Cian O'Mahony further addresses literary depictions of martial identity, in this case examining the works of the Norfolk clergyman Ralph Knevet and arguing that through his writings he intended both to inspire and to construct a native English military identity that was explicitly Protestant and was informed by regional, national, and international outlooks. Finally, Philip Major discusses a seventeenth-century military treatise written by the English soldier Thomas, first Lord Fairfax. This treatise, Major argues, resembles other military memoirs of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), but is also interesting for its clear effort both to influence his contemporary affairs and to establish a strong and honorable military identity for the Fairfax family.
The five chapters in the second section of this volume concern military identity in early modern Ireland, with a special emphasis on Anglo-Irish conflict during the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603). Angela Andreani and Andrew Hadfield's chapter explores the relationship between the Irish clergy and military, considering clerics who served as soldiers and examining the content of pre-combat sermons. The next two chapters, the first by Ruth A. Canning, the second by David Edwards, then focus on Anglo elites in Ireland, tracing how they used military traditions and literary works to reinforce their political and cultural identity as Old Englishmen. James O'Neill's chapter then offers a reassessment of the Nine Years’ War, highlighting the political utility of contrasting military identities for English and Irish fighters. Finally, Clodagh Tait examines the role of wounds in establishing and shaping martial identity.
The final section of the book turns to the figure of the soldier in the early modern English stage. Adam N. McKeown uses Othello to investigate the representation of soldiers as braggarts, while Andrew Hiscock's chapter discusses how the dramatist Thomas Middleton explored the proper roles of soldiers and military violence within English civil society. Finally, Vimala C. Pasupathi and Benjamin J. Armintor provide a quantitative linguistic study that argues for the importance of dramatic works as sources of assertions about early modern martial identity.
Overall, the volume possesses a pleasing consistency and tightness often lacking in such edited collections. It covers merely the decades between 1560 and 1640, concerns only English, Irish, and Anglo-Irish soldiers, and is heavily weighted toward literary scholarship. Despite such a seemingly narrow focus, however, the volume not only offers numerous significant and broadly relevant insights into how fighting men understood and presented themselves or were represented, it also addresses important questions about the nature of early modern masculinity, honor, and noble identity, as well as how such matters could be intertwined with confessional affiliation, familial ties, politics, and national identity. In his brief afterword, Matthew Woodcock argues that one of the collection's aims was to stimulate additional studies of military identity and the representation of early modern warfare. One hopes that the work's clear value and success will serve as a spur for military historians to do precisely that.
