Harari, Yuval N. Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History, and Identity, 1450-1600. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2004.

With this monograph Yuval Noah Harari, adapting his doctoral thesis, has set out to create a systematic study of a unique corpus of military sources. The work is divided into four parts “Part I: Memoirists as Eyewitnesses and Individuals,” “Part II: The Reality of Renaissance Military Memoirs,” “Part III: Things Worthy of Remembrance,” and “Part IV: The Politics of Renaissance Military Memoirs.” This text offers a centralized resource for the study of this body texts with a study of its authors, their strategies of legitimization, and their conceptualizations of war and life. Harari relies primarily on the use of the original texts, but he also furnishes the reader with an introduction into the existing research literature. Readers will note the frequent use of modern military memoirs for comparison. Though their inclusion may feel at times out of place, they are effective in revealing the alterity of these Renaissance texts to the unfamiliar reader.

In the introduction, Harari examines the existing literature on Renaissance memoires more generally and uses this foundation and a number of case studies to propose a list of six criteria for the classification of a work as a military memoire. (pp. 17–18) In Part I, Harari lays out a framework for understanding the social position of the authors and their status as protagonists within their own historical context. He identifies four types of historical protagonists and proposes a list of questions to guide the interpretation of the texts. (pp. 25–26) He discusses the differences between the memoirists as well as the importance of eyewitness accounts, a simple writing style, and trustworthiness. Harari is keen to point out that the corpus lacks a cohesive approach to factual accuracy, often using the perception of truthfulness as a means of boosting the author’s own credibility. The ensuing discussion on individualism covers the complexities of individual and collective identity expressed in the texts, and seeks to provide an explanation for the absence of more intimate individual details in the memoirs.

In Part II, Harari seeks to understand the relationship between the memoirs and the reality of the wars they describe. His methodology incorporates comparisons between Renaissance memoires and modern military memoirs. Though unusual, this approach allows for Renaissance descriptions of quotidian military life, including reports of thirst, dysentery, and wounds, to be more clearly perceived in their impersonal and banal style of documentation. (pp. 73–74) In doing so Harari stresses the importance of plain descriptions of war in Renaissance memoires. This section concludes with further discussion on the memoirs’ embrace of facts and tangibility as opposed to a more personal and abstract evaluation of the individual experience of war, which he contrasts with modern memoirs.

Part III offers a perspective on the inner workings of the Renaissance memoirs, centered on the question of why and how memoirists chose to write. Harari first questions the manner in which events chosen to be preserved in memoires were deemed worthy of documentation. Second, he addresses the role of causality, or the lack thereof, in forming the structure of the texts. Harari proposes that the memoirists may have conceived of their texts as a form of commemoration, contrasting the function of memoirs with the more prescriptive genre of the military guidebook. Finally, he explains how the memoirists’ approach to writing texts can be used to understand their conceptualization of history more generally, which he associates with the Renaissance conceptualization of life itself. (pp. 133–35)

In this final and brief section, Part IV, Harari seeks to understand the place of these memoirs in a larger political context, specifically in the conceptualization of nobility and their role in the violence during the Renaissance. The section ends fittingly with an investigation into the obsession with naming and enumerating in the military memoirs, which Harari uses to contextualize the significance of those left out of the memoirs, such as peasants and foot soldiers, and the injustices inflicted upon them.

The monograph concludes with perspectives from literature outside of the Renaissance military memoir, including modern military memoirs and historical memoirs not of French origin. Readers will also appreciate the catalog of memoirists included in Appendix B. Overall, this monograph is a valuable contribution for those seeking an introduction into this corpus of works and its authors, literary characteristics, and political motivations. Though the body of Renaissance military sources is much broader than the military memoirs alone, the isolation of this group of sources enables a more diverse discourse in the analysis of Renaissance authors and their treatment of war.