Investigations of a Dog

David Lawrence’s The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645 is the most expensive book I’ve ever bought. At £118 it was more than twice the previous record holder, Barbara Donagan’s War In England, but I really need it and it’s not in any of the libraries I can borrow books from. It turned out to be worth reading because it’s really good and vindicates some of the things I’ve written about drill books and cavalry tactics. (more…)

I’ve been reading Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture by Catherine Roach, which is really good and has made me think about lots of things. These are some random observations about it or inspired by it. (more…)

It didn’t take long before I decided to start a Zotero group. It’s called War and Gender and is dedicated to collecting and sharing any material relating to the intersections of these two very important things. There are no limits on period or place, membership is open, and all members can add to the group library. So if you’re interested, and if you’re using Zotero 2.0, get stuck in.

You can see from my profile that the groups I’m involved with so far are all quite specific and tend towards things that relatively little has been written about yet. I think we’re all still finding our way and sticking to things that are likely to be manageable. In the future it’ll be interesting to see if more general groups appear and whether they work out. I could start a British Civil Wars group, but it would be potentially huge. I already have over 900 items in my library tagged with “english civil war”, and these are mostly biased towards my research interests in England 1642-46. I don’t have very much on Scotland, Ireland, the Second Civil War, the Commonwealth or the Protectorate. Maybe more specialist sub-fields will be the way to go, but we’ll see eventually.

Historiann has posted about a very Whiggish article in the New York Times about how changes in warfare have supposedly improved women’s rights by creating more opportunities for female combat soldiers. As Ann points out, there are lots of things wrong with this article. She concentrates on the fact that similar things were said during the Gulf War in 1991 but that the supposed progress evaporated after the war. As some of the commenters suggest, the idea that women used to be incapable of fighting but that changing technology has made things easier it possible for them is basically a lie. Joshua Goldstein’s book War and Gender (which I’ve posted about before) presented lots of empirical evidence to demolish the assumption that women are smaller and weaker than men. This is true on average, but in practice most people aren’t exactly average. In fact statistics for size and strength for men and women are distributed along bell curves which overlap. The biggest, strongest women are bigger and stronger than the smallest, weakest men. Goldstein estimated that in a major war, if combat soldiers were recruited purely by ability and not by gender then about 10-15% of combat soldiers should be female. This has clearly not been the case in reality. Goldstein found that some form of war exists in almost every culture, and that women have nearly always been formally excluded from active combat roles. There are a few exceptions (eg the Dahomey in West Africa in the 19th century, the Soviet Union in the Second World War) but these just prove that women can fight, and therefore their exclusion in most other cultures must be down to gender ideology. Or not quite. Because Goldstein sees the gendering of combat roles as being too universal to be down to gender ideology, which would be expected to be culturally specific. This is where I part company with Goldstein. While War and Gender is a really important book which needs to be read by anyone interested in either war or gender (or just by anyone), it has its limitations, which we need to move on from. (more…)

[cross-posted at The horse in history and culture]

When I started my comeback as a historian in 2006, after a 5 year career break, I wanted to push myself in new directions. Therefore I challenged myself to come up with the most way-out research question possible. What I came up with was: do people construct gender for horses? I decided to look specifically at the roles of horses in war, partly because I’m a military historian, and partly because war is one of the most heavily gendered things in history. I first wrote a blog post about the project in October 2006, but since then I’ve changed my mind about lots of things. I followed up with two posts about how cavalry drill books specified criteria for good war horses. While the books I looked at didn’t always explicitly say that stallions were always best, there was a definite male bias, and mares were never mentioned. This post is a look at where I’ve got to now, and where I need to go next. (more…)

I could have been writing a serious post for the horse history blog, working on my book proposal, planning an article, sorting out my Zotero collections, uploading PRO documents to Flickr, or lots of other things. But the other day my brother took me on an expedition into the attic to look for old toys and books. We found this:

It’s the Ladybird book Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History by the fantastically named L. du Garde Peach. This must surely have been a formative influence on me, and was quite possibly my first ever encounter with the English Civil War. But I can’t remember it at all. That might be just as well because it turned out to be completely insane. Maybe it isn’t fair to laugh at a children’s book first published in 1963 (it wouldn’t have been new when I got it – I’m not that old!), but I’m going to do it anyway. And there’s a serious point here: too many people assume that children are stupid and unimportant, and that therefore it’s OK to give them all sorts of patronising rubbish. (more…)

Back in October 2006 I posted about my speculative (and slightly mad?) project about gendered perceptions of war horses. In a follow-up post I looked at a selection of four early seventeenth-century cavalry drill books to see what they said about requirements for war horses. Only Gervase Markham explicitly stated that a war horse should be a stallion, but all four authors habitually referred to the war horse as “he”. There was a particularly intriguing passage in Robert Ward’s Animadversions of War about using cats and hedgehogs to encourage lazy horses. He specifically mentioned the horse’s testicles, which shows that he had a stallion in mind. At the time I wondred why he referred to the horse and hedgehog as male but the cat as female. Now I think I have a possible answer: it could be connected with the gender of the equivalent Latin nouns. Equus (horse) and echinus (hedgehog) are masculine but feles (cat) is feminine. That doesn’t entirely solve the problem, it just moves it further back. Now I want to know why the Romans thought horses should be masculine and cats should be feminine.

Since that first post I’ve discovered that my assumptions about non-human species not having culture or gender were wrong. Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender has lots of examples of culturally specific learned behaviour and gendered dominance hierarchies among animals. But I think I’m onto something with looking at whether human gender ideology led to gendered roles being imposed on other species. Samantha Hurn has found evidence of gendered roles being imposed by breeders of Welsh cobs. I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy of her article yet, but it looks very relevant.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Shakespeare’s Henry V again as there are plenty of mentions of war horses in it. But I still can’t work out what’s going on with the Dauphin and his horse. Bestiality? Idolatry? Just the general arrogance and ridiculousness of the French?

1. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
2. Samantha Hurn, ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’, Society & Animals, 16 (March 2008), pp. 23-44.
3. Robert Ward, Anima’dversions of vvarre; (London : Printed by Iohn Dawson [, Thomas Cotes, and Richard Bishop], and are to be sold by Francis Eglesfield at the signe of the Marigold in Pauls Church-yard, 1639., 1639).

Last week I finally got round to reading Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender. Goldstein argues that gender shapes war, and that war shapes gender. The evidence for the first is very strong. War would be different if its conduct wasn’t dominated by gender ideology. War has occurred in nearly all cultures, but nearly all cultures in nearly all periods have excluded women from active combat roles. The argument that this is because women are biologically unsuited to combat does not stand up. Goldstein shows that although women are smaller and weaker than men on average individuals are distributed along bell curves which overlap. The top 10 to 15% of women are bigger and stronger than then bottom 10 to 15% of men. Therefore under some historical circumstances armies could have had more and better soldiers if they recruited women as well as men.

The second argument, that war shapes gender, isn’t so strong. It’s true that gender is at least as universal as war, but Goldstein acknowledges that gender roles vary widely across cultures in almost every respect other than combat roles and hunting. It seems hard to explain how all of this diversity could be directed towards the same purpose: to produce warriors or potential warriors. Goldstein is very much the voice of rational liberal 20th century America. Although he makes good use of anthropology and recognises the huge diversity of gathering-hunting cultures I think he underestimates the strangeness of medieval and early-modern European cultures.

As an alternative to the warrior, Goldstein suggests the provider as a new ideal of masculinity which American men might aspire to in future. The big problem here is that this model is suspiciously similar to the ideals of early-modern English patriarchy studied by Anthony Fletcher and Alexandra Shepard. There was more to the early-modern patriarch than just providing, but he was certainly more of a provider than a warrior. To be a man was to be the head of a household. Boys were toughened up, but this was mainly so that they could control their own bodies, their wives, their children, and their servants. The ordered household was seen as the basis of an ordered society. In contrast, the warrior was not much of a normative ideal. Grievances over billeting suggest that even before the civil wars English civilians saw English soldiers as dangerous outsiders. Stereotypes of professional soldiers had more in common with the disobedient anti-patriarchal forms of masculinity which Shepard identified among students and apprentices. War was disorder: the very thing that early-modern patriarchy most feared.

I’m still in awe of Goldstein’s ambitious scholarship, and I think we need more historians (particularly military historians) to show this kind of imagination. But I also think his work shows some of the weaknesses of broad comparative studies: they risk abstracting and generalising to such an extent that a lot of important differences can be lost.

1. Anthony J Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1995).
2. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
3. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).

While trawling (not trolling) for more posts that I can include in the next MHC, I found something interesting via Muhlberger’s Early History:

The Soldier in Later Medieval England is a major research project directed by Anne Curry (who was my personal tutor when I was an undergraduate at Reading). They now have a pilot database online (with free access) with details of thousands of soldiers who fought in the Hundred Years War. This should be really useful for anyone interested in medieval military history, not least because the financial records that the data comes from give much more accurate figures for army sizes than the estimates in chronicles.

Anyone with online access to War In History can now download my debut article which is about horses and the New Model Army. I haven’t got my hands on a hard copy yet, but it’s quite exciting to see it on the website. Now I just need to finish the Difficult Second Article…

1. Gavin Robinson, ‘Horse Supply and the Development of the New Model Army, 1642-1646’, War In History, 15 (April 2008), pp. 121-140.