On Matters Military and Historical

by

Gillian Polack

When I hear the words “noble” and “warrior,” it doesn't matter how much history I have in my past, I think of big movies with much swordplay and drama, I think of adventure history in novel form, I think of colour and vibrancy. I’m an equal opportunity offender in this instance, at least. When I think of “noble” and “warrior” in the context of the Middle Ages, I think of the feuding Mez cycle of epic legends and the horror of serial betrayal depicted in Raoul de Cambrai and the vainglory of the Chanson de Roland. In short, I think of derring-do and I think of stories.

Yet these stories come from somewhere. There were (and still are) societies that have noble warriors. There is a reality behind the stories.

Brain Sandberg looks very closely at this reality in his Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France. He looks at what makes up a noble warrior at a time of great civil conflict, a time of endemic warfare, a time of religious anger and trouble, and (not by any chance at all) one of those times that have given us a major literary model for what it is to be a noble, fighting for self, family, Crown. This book is the polar opposite of those French tales I love so much—it started life as a doctoral dissertation.

Some excellent books begin their lives as doctoral dissertations. Other books, underpinned by wonderful research, are impossible to read. A dissertation needs to be translated, in fact, to become the kind of book that is accessible to readers. Brian Sandberg translates his doctoral dissertation very effectively in Warrior Pursuits. It bears some of the hallmarks of a dissertation (the density of ideas in some sections, the strict confines to which the overall question are kept, the fact that there is a clear overall question) but the vast apparatus that so often signifies a history thesis is thinned and Sandberg’s prose, while not light, is readable.

What’s good about a doctoral dissertation turned into a monograph is that readers get to find out a bit more about sources and how they’re interpreted. This is a part of the nature of the creature—the sources and how the historian approaches them are important elements of a thesis. They ought to be important elements of all histories, but they’re not. Far too often a reader has to do a bit of detective work, discovering the sources through mentions in the text. Sandberg lists the types of sources—including a vast array of administrative documents, financial records, personal correspondence, printed polemics, treatises on war, and more—and they make my mouth water. The Middle Ages isn’t nearly as rich in written sources as the seventeenth century.

Does this sound dull? It really isn’t. It’s not the excitement of rollicking adventure. It’s the excitement of digging beneath the surface of a society and understanding what makes it tick. This is a book that needs to be in a writer’s library if they use the seventeenth century, or want to write about military organisation, or even feel impelled to invent a universe where masculinity is expressed through military means. It has significant insights into how a warrior culture actually works for a specific place and time. I kept wanting more, but for a fiction writer, what Sandberg presents is more than sufficient to spark the creation of a viable country where war is endemic. Even for an historian, it’s a solid book that breaks new ground in a thoughtful and considered way.

It’s not for light summer reading. It requires focus. It’s dense. This is the downside of a good volume of history that was once a dissertation. Moreover, it’s much more accessible for a reader who already possesses as significant knowledge of French history. A good map also helps—the maps in the book are too small and I found them very hard to decipher.

There were some specific elements I really liked. One was how Sandberg’s work made me re-evaluate my own understanding of the period I’m supposed to know, several hundred years earlier than the century Sandberg examines. For instance, Sandberg points out that seventeenth-century warrior nobles understood commerce and received income from a variety of sources (which he discusses). What, then, shaped the income expectations of their ancestors? Theoretically I have a stock answer to this, which I learned as an undergraduate studying my two units of economic history. In reality, Sandberg’s analysis made me realise that I’ve seen quite a bit of evidence for commerce and mixed incomes for nobles in the Middle Ages. I was fixed in my very old-fashioned training in the rise of the market economy. Now I’m cutting loose. This is the wonderful thing about new studies: they make me question the old teachings and they give me new roads in to understanding. Now I need to look for Medievalists who look at the world through the same glasses as Sandberg and see what they have to say about the situation.

As a history, Warrior Pursuits has certain weaknesses. For instance, Sandberg doesn’t really link to earlier culture and its lingering effects. He demonstrates quite clearly that the nobles in certain regions in seventeenth-century France were not quite as modern as has been assumed, but he doesn’t do a deep contrast with equivalent groups in the same societies prior to the seventeenth century. This means we really can’t know how much of their behaviour (in developing endemic warfare, in how they create alliances, in the role of honour in society) is innovative and how much is a continuing expression of earlier culture.

Likewise, Sandberg admits that the focus is on men, but in leaving specific studies of how those men relate to the women in their lives, it’s hard to work out why the women leaders (for instance and maybe especially Louis XIII’s mother, Marie de Medici) are able to be major actors.

In other words, in a culture of noble male warriors those warriors cannot really be considered without their social contexts. This doesn’t simply include women. It includes the non-nobles (and the rise of the non-military nobility in the seventeenth century is mentioned, but not properly discussed) and children. Possible questions that could have been addressed include how they fitted around the noble warriors that Sandberg discusses, or how the noble warriors fitted around them, how the different parties interacted with each others, and whether these interactions and relationships formed an important part of the warrior identity.

Sandberg doesn’t offer an overview of the Wars of Religion. They are there, in the background, much of the time, but it’s important to understand basic French history before opening Warrior Pursuits.

One element I found particularly fascinating—largely because it exists (and very strongly) in the Middle Ages, is the way these noble warriors were aware of their lineage and consciously crafted it. They crafted their connections, too. Ancestry and connections are very important to them, which Sandberg demonstrates quite clearly. This is why I would have liked to see whether that same level of conscious effort went into crafting other kinds of relationships: not just with the past and with other male nobles, but with the rest of society. Or was this great effort very specific and focused and all spent on awareness of ancestry and on particular types of connections?

Tracing the changes in noble culture and warrior culture over time helps make a lot more sense of the Wars of Religion in the south than using a simple religious (Catholic vs. Protestant) framework. Religion is an integral part of the endemic warfare, but so are family affiliations, so is honour and so are a range of other factors, many of which Sandberg analyses.

As a bonus, Sandberg’s asides help make sense of French novels, especially those of Dumas père. He explains why d’Artagnan was drawn the way he was and why armed men carried certain attitudes as well as specific equipment. In fact, Warrior Pursuits is full of insights that help make sense of aspects of French history and culture that are somewhat alien to an Anglophone twenty-first century viewpoint. It’s not all about The Three Musketeers.

This is a lovely book. Dense in historical detail, full of thought, I’m afraid I carried it to a history class with me (I often read my review books on the way to class) and brandished it before my students like a weapon.

“This is the sort of book you're after,” I said, “When you want to start getting into the minds and hearts of a previous generation. Not just this one book, but a number of approaches and a number of scholars. But definitely this one book if you are at all interested in how the nobility operated in France in the seventeenth century.” Which they really weren’t: it was a class on family history.

Books mentioned in this column:
Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France by Brian Sandberg (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas père (serialised 1844)

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains ‘etc’ as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.