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Gunpowder, Masculinity, and Warfare in German Texts 1400-1700. By Patrick Brugh. Changing Persectives on Early Modern Europe. Rochester, NY.: University of Rochester Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5804-6968-5. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xci, 255. $125.00 (hardcover).

In Gunpowder, Masculinity, and Warfare in German Texts 1400-1700, Patrick Brugh expands the understanding of military history by using the techniques of literary theory, image analysis, and gender studies to examine the effects of gunpowder on the culture, understanding, and representation of war in early modern Germany. Brugh examines three genres of texts: Kriegsbücher, Flugblätter (broadsheets), and war novels. He argues that between 1400 and 1700, the use of gunpowder transformed Europeans’ understanding of and representation of war. He groups these transformations into three categories: aesthetic changes, gendered changes, and moral/ethical changes. The changes were not necessarily linear, and depended on the context within which the representative texts were created.

The book’s introductory chapter sets up the theoretical foundation for the argument. Then, Brugh divides his work into three sets of analyses, organized both chronologically and by genre. The first section deals with the history and representation of gunpowder weapons in the fifteenth century, especially in the Hussite Wars. It ends with a case study of Leonhard Fronsperger’s sixteenth-century Kriegsbuch. The second examines two sets of seventeenth-century Flugsblätter about King Gustavus Adolphus’s 1630-1632 campaign, and the King’s death at Lützen in 1632. The third deals with representations of war and of gunpowder weapons in seventeenth-century satirical novels, and with the transition to the ideal of the cavalier in the laten1600s.

Brugh argues that the representation of gunpowder weapons in German texts between 1400 and 1700 falls on a continuum, from practical acceptance, to neutrality, to condemnation. In his Kriegsbuch, Fronsperger criticizes gunpowder by likening it to plague, by claiming that it was an assault on manliness in warriors, and inserting an aesthetic dissonance into the understanding of war—a brave and manly hero could be killed by a brat with a gun. On the other hand, he defended the use of firearms as a necessary component of a “loaded peace”—war was necessary to keep the peace, and firearms were necessary to be successful in war (p. 86).

In broadsheets, gunpowder served both narrative and allegorical purposes, telling the story of battles and ascribing meaning to them. Brugh argues that broadsheets provide an early modern form of hypertextual analysis, in which a static image conveys changes in battle circumstances. The inclusion of reproductions of the broadsheets makes the argument clearer. Brugh concludes that the meaning of gunpowder was flexible, depending on the needs of the creator of the broadsheet. (p.146)

In his chapters on seventeenth-century novels, Brugh focuses on works by Johann Michael Moscherosch (Geschichte Philanders vom Sittewalt), H.J.C. Grimmelshausen (the Simpliciana), and Eberhart Happel (Der insulanische Mandorell). Moscherosch’s and Grimmleshausen’s works present war from the perspective of lower-status folk swept up in the Thirty Years’ War, rather than from the perspective of a warrior hero. Firearms not only upset the traditional understanding of heroic warrior masculinity, but made people worse in moral and ethical terms. In Happel’s work, Brugh finds a revival of the heroic warrior figure, but this time in the context of the cavalier, who uses gunpowder weapons not against other Christian Europeans, but against non-Christians and non-Europeans, and becomes a new figure of nationalist and colonialist strength.

Brugh skillfully blends traditional military history with literary, gender, and cultural studies. He explains the development of technology and tactics with specific references to battles, and then he develops his arguments about the representation of gunpowder weapons in a variety of texts, with specific attention to the changes in the aesthetics of warfare, the image of warrior masculinity, and the ethical and moral implications of warfare.

The book uses the jargon of literary theory, but Brugh explains the terms clearly for readers who are unfamiliar with them. He includes both the German texts and English translations of specific passages he analyzes. This allows German speakers to follow Brugh’s linguistic arguments closely, and allows those who do not read German to understand the argument without needing to translate the German.

Readers interested in the broader cultural context of military history, in image analysis, and in gender analysis will want to read this book. It is probably too specialized (and, in hardcover, too expensive) for most undergraduate courses, though individual chapters, especially those dealing with broadsheets, might be useful for teaching students to approach visual sources.

Janis M. Gibbs

Hope College