MIT Building E51-275

Presented by David S. Bachrach, Professor of Medieval European History, University of New Hampshire When: Tuesday, October 6 @ 5:15 PM Where: Tang Center - Building E51, Room E51-275 (map) Abstract: Military history as a subfield within medieval studies has suffered considerably from the fact that both medieval authors and modern scholars have seen warfare as a nasty element of the human experience, that is better condemned or even ignored than studied. As a consequence, the examination of warfare is often treated as an adjunct to other areas of inquiry, with the result that many well-meaning historians continue to pass along shibboleths long-since discarded by the relatively small number of specialists in medieval military history. This is particularly true with regard to scholarship dealing with the German kingdom because very few non-German speaking historians do much work on Germany, and German-speaking historians, with some notable exceptions, particularly in Switzerland and Austria, have eschewed the study of military matters in the period since the Second World War. One particularly important shibboleth, which still permeates studies of the German kingdom, is the notion that warfare was dominated by small numbers of warrior aristocrats who fought on horseback. In this paper, I will be addressing four major themes […]