Armies in the Sexual Imaginary of France and the Holy Roman Empire, 1500-1650

Abstract

Armies in the Sexual Imaginary of France and the Holy Roman Empire explores how early moderns assessed the impact of sexuality on the social order through depictions of military life in an age of social upheaval and religious warfare, 1500-1650. It interweaves three historiographies on early modern Europe: military history, the history of sexuality, and histories of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, focusing on the ways that writers, commentators, military theorists, and reformers both inside and outside of military institutions consistently cast armies as socio-sexual laboratories for the development of notions of social order and sexual restraint. Surveying military treatises, visual imagery, military regulations, chronicles, ego-documents, religious writings, household manuals, and political literature, this dissertation demonstrates that armies were central to the early modern sexual imaginary: the nexus of attitudes, convictions, and ideas early modern people had about sexuality. Because armies were at once part of and apart from the societies that formed and financed them, armies invited individuals to debate forms of sexuality such as prostitution and sexual violence considered anathema to Christian polities. As rigorously hierarchal institutions, militaries thus encouraged observers and writers to think through the intersection of gender, sexuality, and social status. In prescriptive and philosophical discourses, armies were sites where young men learned to discipline themselves and accept the disciplining of their superiors. At the same time, writers recognized that soldiers engaged in unbridled sexual acts and sexual violence. Since armies represented the antithesis of the social order and sexual probity that Protestants and Catholics alike extolled, they galvanized visions of a well-ordered society. Moreover, armies were at once a vehicle of the imagination subject to the license of writers and artists and tangible institutions that affected people’s material lives profoundly. The project of religious reform would remain incomplete, it was thought, unless it also transformed the conduct of armies. The early modern tropes about army life – that soldiers and women camp followers eschewed marriage for fleeting sexual liaisons and that nobles refrained from disciplining those who violated regulations prohibiting sexual activity outside of marriage – therefore came to justify increasingly invasive means of policing soldiers’ and camp followers’ intimate lives. This development must be understood as a “military reformation” insofar as similar practices of discipline characterized the efforts at religious reform in cities and towns across Europe. In sum, this dissertation argues that armies were a forum for people to discern how gender and sexuality shaped the social order. They served as a model of or as a foil for gender and sexual propriety in a context in which in which warfare was endemic and the sexual order underwent marked change.