Introduction: Military Lives in the Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World (original) (raw)

Abstract

If, as the often-repeated ancient precept would have it, money comprises the sinews of war, during the medieval and early modern periods the written word increasingly comprised its other connective tissue. Against the backdrop of burgeoning administrative correspondence, technical treatises, and the bureaucratic testimony and self-narrative required for oversight and career ascent, the evolving armies of the period became sites of a vibrant textual culture. Access to paper and familiarity with writing practices in various registers were among the material conditions that allowed military writing, including life writing, to flourish. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the heterogeneous character of armies, the precarious status of non-noble soldiers, and the contested nature of the means and justification for warfare were all debates in which soldiers themselves could intervene by writing. In such works it is often the lived experience of the soldier - figured in either a biographical or (pseudo)autobiographical frame - that is offered as entertainment, edification, or the grounds for authoritative argumentation. The present volume focuses on this singular thematic element in the multifarious military textual ecology: the military vida or life, defined broadly here as an account of a life (real or imagined), marked by service in arms. Beyond the writing required for basic military functioning, the institution - along with the conflicted figure of the soldier - left a distinctive literary footprint, in genres including the chivalric biography and humanist dialogue, which rehearsed problems associated with military ethics, to comic and dramatic literature, which alternately satirized or idealized military experience through the contradictory figures of the valiente and the braggart soldier. The present volume brings together eleven articles examining different aspects of medieval and early modern military life, as it is refracted through the prism of a variety of textual genres. The essays are organized in a roughly chronological arc, although a web of shared themes connects them to each other. By bringing together different approaches to the study of military lives and their textual manifestations, spanning the global empires of Spain and Portugal, this volume aims to explore these works as aesthetic laboratories, engines of knowledge production, and sites of ideological articulation.

Key takeaways

AI

1. The volume explores military life writing as a significant textual culture in medieval and early modern Iberia.
2. Eleven articles analyze diverse genres reflecting military experiences, including chivalric biography and humanist dialogue.
3. The emergence of military bureaucracies shaped soldiers' narratives and their aspirations for social mobility.
4. Debates on military ethics, merit, and recognition inform the representation of soldierly experiences in texts.
5. The volume aims to enrich scholarship on military textuality across the global Iberian world.

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