Who were the shadow agents of Renaissance war? In this pioneering collection of essays scholars use new archival evidence and other sources, including literature, artworks, and other non-textual material, to uncover those men, women, children and other animals who sustained war by means of their preparatory, auxiliary, infrastructural, or supplementary labour. These shadow agents worked in the zone between visibility and invisibility, often moving between civilians and soldiers, and their labour was frequently forced. This volume engages with a range of important debates including: the relationship between war and state formation; the ‘military revolution’ or transformation of early modern military force; the nature of human and non-human agency; gender and war; civilian protection and expulsion; and espionage and diplomacy. The focus of the volume is on Italy, but it includes studies of France and England, and the editors place these themes in a broader European context with the aim of supporting and stimulating research in this field.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- I. Introduction: War and Agency
- Introduction
- War and Agency
- Stephen Bowd, Sarah Cockram, and John Gagné
- II.The Unwilling Agents of War
- 1. Refugees, Forced Migration and Henry VIII’s Conquest of France, 1544–46
- 2. Prisoners for War
- Convicts, Slaves, and the Culture of Forced Labour in Sixteenth-Century Tuscany
- 3. ‘A Horse is a Feeling Animal’
- Interspecies Interaction and Animal Agency in Renaissance Warfare
- III. The Organizers and Suppliers of War
- 4. Shadow Bureaucrats and Bureaucracy in Trecento Florence
- 5. Heralds and the Representational Culture of War, 1350–1600
- 6. The Diverse Agencies of Renaissance Engineers in the Shadow of War
- 7. Agents of Firearms Supply in Sixteenth-Century Italy
- Rethinking the Contractor State
- 8. The Invisible Trade
- Commoners and Convicts as Early Modern Venice’s Spies
- IV. Women and Agency in War
- 9. Gender, War, and the State
- The Military Management of Alda Pio Gambara During the Italian Wars
- 10. Delivering Arms
- Noblewomen, Artillery, and the Gendering of Violence During the French Wars of Religion
- 11. Useless Mouths in Early Modern Italian Literature
- Gian Giorgio Trissino and Lucrezia Marinella
- Index
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