Propaganda, Blasphemy, and the Savage God in Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man

T he sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were an age of wars of religion. From the Catholic-Huguenot struggle in France to the Defenestration of Prague (1618), religious differences both caused and justified numerous civil and foreign wars. In one case – the English Civil War – political and social radicalism grew out of religious disputes. Although modern historians have come to question religious motives and justifications as the principal catalysts in struggles such as the Dutch war of independence, they have not questioned the importance of religious divisions within societies and monarchs' attempts to impose religious uniformity as major issues in early modern struggles. The European phenomenon stretched from the Urals to the Atlantic. In Russia, religious disputes and millenarianism played a major role in all revolts after the Old Believer schism of the late seventeenth century. Few events in early modern Ukrainian history drew such widespread contemporary attention as the Khmel'nyts'kyiuprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Rumors of the slaughter of landlords, Jews, and Catholics in 1648 reverberated in the grain ports on the Baltic, in the Jesuit houses in central Europe, and in Jewish communities on the Mediterranean. The destruction of the armies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth led Sweden, the Habsburgs, France, and many other powers to reevaluate their view of the balance of power. The Cossack leader Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi had upset this balance by his alliance with the Crimean khan in early 1648.

204 Health & History, 2012. 14/1 Book Reviews Doreen Evenden, The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London, Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). ISBN: 13 978-0-521-02785-4 (PB). xvii + 260pp. Accounts of early modern women and their contribution to medicine have begun to surface in recent years, yet the reclamation of women’s stories remains an ongoing process. Doreen Evenden makes great advances toward this aim in her unique and exciting monograph on midwifery. Previously, midwives have been viewed as ‘ignorant, incompetent and poor’ (p. 1). Evenden rejects these traditional and disparaging views and recasts seventeenth-century London midwives in a different light. This monograph is divided into five chapters, an epilogue, and several detailed appendices. Chapter one addresses the semi-regulated aspect of London midwifery. It highlights that midwives were licensed with the Church of England; they paid fees, and swore an oath upon licensing. Evenden demonstrates that London midwives were akin to a professional association and were expected to meet specific moral, spiritual, and skilled standards. In chapter two, Evenden uncovers parallels between midwives and other trade-based apprenticeships. Evenden uses archival sources to demonstrate that midwives formed large supportive networks and they underwent a lengthy process to attain their trade. This relatively organic system of apprenticeship was acknowledged and accepted by the professional medical establishment, suggesting a measure of respect for midwives. Chapter three contains an enjoyable and detailed narrative of theexperiencesofmidwives:howtheyperformedthetaskofchild delivery and the implications of seventeenth-century childbirth. Using primary sources to give voice to London midwives, Evenden brings life to the women who inspired her monograph. A picture emerges of large communities of midwives and clients, surprisingly mirroring the experiences of rural England. Health & History ● 14/1 ● 2012 205 In chapter four Evenden provides a socioeconomic profile of London midwives. Midwives were usually married or widowed, of a more mature age when licensed, and they were well paid. Midwives have been misrepresented as incompetent and underprivileged, but they actually experienced considerable standing in their community. Chapter five lists biographical details of seventy-six midwives from twelve parishes. This chapter is, admittedly, data-laden and somewhat awkward to read, but it provides new information regarding midwives’ identities. This data is invaluable to the study of early modern midwives and historical developments in medicine. Inpresentingthisexcitingnewarchivalresearch,Evendenhas provided little contextualisation of the broader historical events. The seventeenth century saw great political, social, and religious upheaval in the British Isles. Arguably the most disruptive event in the seventeenth century, Evenden argues that the English Civil Wars’ ‘impact on the lives of London midwives left few traces’ (p. 16). This is an interesting conclusion to draw since the climate of war—fear, general disorder, the possible threat of uprising within London, and the king’s advance on that city in late 1642— had considerable effect on contemporaries. In fact, a major gap in licensing records for midwives exists for 1642–60, possibly demonstrating that midwives did not attain licenses during these years. By failing to provide, or acknowledge, this contextual information, Evenden has presented the London midwives as an isolated microcosm. This appears intentional, done to ensure midwives’ everyday experiences stood at the centre of her work. This approach leaves much room for academics to problematise the experiences of early modern women in relation to wider historical trends. Surprisingly, Evenden does not discuss gender and space in her work. Again, this appears to be intentional, because while reclaiming these midwives’ stories, Evenden purposefully disregards all gendered, negative, literary-based sources. These sources demonstrate the prevailing gender norms and beliefs about women’s roles in society. They form a component of women’s experiences in the early modern period, yet Evenden has purposefully eschewed their existence. Midwives were as susceptible to the prevailing assumptions about gender roles and would have had to conform to these ideals. Gendered viewpoints 206 BOOK REVIEWS also explain some of the negative perceptions of midwives that have been carried through the historiography. Despite these criticisms, Evenden’s work is an inspiring reconstruction of the stories of seventeenth-century London midwives. The strength of this work is its extensive use of archival material, the generosity with which...

Author's Introduction The articles in this cluster deal with aspects of an enormously rich and complex historical problem: the role of print and other media in political communication in Britain, from the Tudor period through the nineteenth century. They might be employed together in a course covering this large subject; but equally they lend themselves to separate use in other kinds of courses, dealing with problems ranging from conventional political history to the role of literacy in early modern society, the nature of early modern public culture or the rise of more open and ‘democratic’ forms of politics. Rather than trying to tailor this guide to a single course design I have tried to suggest a range of possibilities. The full cluster is made up of the following articles: 1. Mark Knights , ‘History and Literature in the Age of Defoe and Swift’, History Compass , 3/1 (2005), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00131.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bsl131 . 2. Joad Raymond , ‘Seventeenth‐Century Print Culture’, History Compass , 2/1 (2004), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00131.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bsl123 . 3. Mark Hampton , ‘Newspapers in Victorian Britain’, History Compass , 2/1 (2004), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2004.00101.x . URL http://www.blackwellcompass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bsl101 . 4. Jason Peacey , ‘Print and Public Politics in Seventeenth‐Century England’, History Compass , 5/1 (2007), 85–111, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00369.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl369 . 5. Alastair Bellany , ‘Railing Rhymes Revisited: Libels, Scandals, and Early Stuart Politics’, History Compass , 5/4 (2007), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00439.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl439 . 6. Brian Cowan , ‘Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British Coffeehouse’, History Compass , 5/4 (2007), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl440 . 7. Andrew Walkling , ‘Politics and Theatrical Culture in Restoration England’, History Compass , DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00453.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl453 . 8. Joseph Black , ‘The Marprelate Tracts (1588–89) and the Public Sphere’, History Compass , (forthcoming). Author Recommends The relevant secondary literature is enormous but the following are suggested as surveys or preliminary guides to particular topics. 1. Jurgen Habermas , The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , trans. Lawrence Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). A translation of Habermas's deeply controversial but highly influential theoretical study, first published in German in 1965. An extensive literature exists debating Habermas's theories and their usefulness to historical investigations. 2. Alastair Bellany , The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News, Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). A study of how the involvement of high‐ranking courtiers in a murder became the subject of a famous scandal, through the ways in which it was reported and discussed in print and especially manuscript sources. 3. Brian Cowan , The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). A wide ranging survey of the development of coffeehouses and their role as centres of social interaction and political discussion. 4. Adam Fox , Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). A ma

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Emergence of Adversary Politics in the Long ParliamentMark KishlanskyMark Kishlansky Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 49, Number 4Dec., 1977 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/241624 Views: 18Total views on this site Citations: 20Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1977 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Thomas Leng The Meanings of “Malignancy”: The Language of Enmity and the Construction of the Parliamentarian Cause in the English Revolution, Journal of British Studies 53, no.44 (Nov 2014): 835–858.https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2014.109Susan D. Amussen Turning the World Upside Down: Gender and Inversion in the work of David Underdown, History Compass 11, no.55 (May 2013): 394–404.https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12036 ‘‘Machines of Government’’: Replacing the Liberum Veto in the Eighteenth-Century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, The Slavonic and East European Review 90, no.11 (Jan 2012): 65–97.https://doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.90.1.0065Noah Millstone Evil Counsel: The Propositions to Bridle the Impertinency of Parliament and the Critique of Caroline Government in the Late 1620s, The Journal of British Studies 50, no.44 (Dec 2012): 813–839.https://doi.org/10.1086/661000John Adamson Introduction: High Roads and Blind Alleys — The English Civil War and its Historiography, (Jan 2009): 1–35.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-01965-3_1Ann Kaegi “How apply you this?” Conflict and consensus in Coriolanus, Shakespeare 4, no.44 (Dec 2008): 362–378.https://doi.org/10.1080/17450910802501089Andrew McRae Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State, 3 (Sep 2009).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483806David Scott The Outbreak of the English Civil War: August 1642–September 1643, (Jan 2004): 37–67.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3842-8_2Quentin Skinner Visions of Politics, 38 (Sep 2012).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613777Ann Hughes Consensus or Conflict? Politics and Religion in Early Stuart England, (Jan 1998): 58–113.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27110-8_3Michael B. Young Introduction, (Jan 1997): 1–13.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25309-8_1Sharon Achinstein Introduction: Gender, literature, and the English revolution, Women's Studies 24, no.1-21-2 (Nov 1994): 1–13.https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.1994.9979040J. C. Davis Religion and the struggle for freedom in the English Revolution, The Historical Journal 35, no.33 (Mar 2010): 507–530.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X00025954Jack A. Goldstone East and West in the Seventeenth Century: Political Crises in Stuart England, Ottoman Turkey, and Ming China, Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no.11 (Jun 2009): 103–142.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500015061Paul Christianson Political Thought in Early Stuart England, The Historical Journal 30, no.44 (Feb 2009): 955–970.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X0002241XAnn Hughes The King, the Parliament, and the Localities during the English Civil War, Journal of British Studies 24, no.22 (Jan 2014): 236–263.https://doi.org/10.1086/385833William G. Palmer Oliver St. John and the Middle Group in the Long Parliament, 1643-1645: A Reappraisal, Albion 14, no.11 (Jul 2014): 20–26.https://doi.org/10.2307/4048483Ann Hughes Militancy and Localism: Warwickshire Politics and Westminster Politics, 1643–1647 ( The Alexander Prize Essay ), Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (Feb 2009): 51–68.https://doi.org/10.2307/3679045 Lotte Mulligan Puritans and English Science: A Critique of Webster, Isis 71, no.33 (Oct 2015): 456–469.https://doi.org/10.1086/352544Jane Mansbridge Consensus in context: a guide for social movements, (): 229–253.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-786X(03)80026-5

Historians such as Conrad Russell and Kevin Sharpe have recently stressed the “British” nature of the crisis which toppled Charles I's regime in the 1640s. England, these historians remind us, was not the first of Charles's three kingdoms to rebel but the last; the Scots rose in 1639–40, the Irish rose in the fall of 1641, but the English only belatedly followed suit in August 1642. They have thus suggested that the origins of the English Civil War cannot be explained within a purely English context but must be understood within the larger vortex of multinational British politics.This injection of the “British problem” into the historiographical debate may seem like a neutral intervention, but in practice it has been closely associated with the revisionist interpretation of the seventeenth century. Since the 1970s, revisionist historians have contended that early Stuart England was an ideologically stable society which collapsed only after a series of sudden, contingent events disrupted the existing consensus. They have thus been at pains to find short-term, nonideological explanations for the Civil War's outbreak or else face embarrassing charges that they have proven why there was no civil war in seventeenth-century England. The “British problem” has come into the debate as just such an explanation, as an answer to thorny questions about how such a violent storm as the English Civil War could have arisen out of clear skies. After all, if radicalized Scotsmen spread the language of confessional conflict and resistance theory across the border, as Sharpe has argued, then no internal explanation for the English Civil War is required.

Previous article No AccessEpic Romance, Royalist Retreat, and the English Civil War*Anthony WelchAnthony WelchUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville Search for more articles by this author University of Tennessee, KnoxvillePDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 105, Number 3February 2008 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/591261 Views: 49Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref © 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Sonya Cronin Retreat Not Defeat: Politicized Topographies and a Poetics of Order, (Mar 2022): 43–88.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89609-6_2Colin Lahive Reading and Writing Romance in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Literature Compass 12, no.1010 (Oct 2015): 527–537.https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12256Rachel Dunn Breaking a tradition: Hester Pulter and the English emblem book, The Seventeenth Century 30, no.11 (Feb 2015): 55–73.https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2015.1007157Brandon Chua The Purposes of Playing on the Post Civil War Stage: The Politics of Affection in William Davenant’s Dramatic Theory, Exemplaria 26, no.11 (Jan 2014): 39–57.https://doi.org/10.1179/1041257313Z.00000000040 김보민 The Fates of the Poetics of Epic in the Age of Leviathan: Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert, and Thomas Hobbes’s Answer to the Preface, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 23, no.22 (Nov 2013): 303–325.https://doi.org/10.17054/jmemes.2013.23.2.303Amelia Zurcher Serious Extravagance: Romance Writing in Seventeenth-Century England, Literature Compass 8, no.66 (Jun 2011): 376–389.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00805.x

Twentieth-century practices of battlefield preservation construct war graves as sites of memory and continuing commemoration. Such ideas, though they have led archaeologists in a largely fruitless hunt for mass graves, should not be read back into the seventeenth century. Hitherto, little attention has been paid to the practices of battlefield burial, despite the suggestion that the civil wars were proportionately the bloodiest conflict in English history. This chapter analyses the evidence for the treatment of the dead of the civil wars, engaging with debates about the nature and preservation of civil-war battlefields, and the social memory of the civil wars in the mid and later seventeenth century. It concludes that ordinary civil-war soldiers were typically excluded from parish registers as a sign that they were branded as social outcasts in death.

Twentieth-century practices of battlefield preservation construct war graves as sites of memory and continuing commemoration. Such ideas, though they have led archaeologists in a largely fruitless hunt for mass graves, should not be read back into the seventeenth century. Hitherto, little attention has been paid to the practices of battlefield burial, despite the suggestion that the civil wars were proportionately the bloodiest conflict in English history. This chapter analyses the evidence for the treatment of the dead of the civil wars, engaging with debates about the nature and preservation of civil-war battlefields, and the social memory of the civil wars in the mid and later seventeenth century. It concludes that ordinary civil-war soldiers were typically excluded from parish registers as a sign that they were branded as social outcasts in death.

Apart from the ‘English Civil War’, now better described as the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’,1 the seventeenth century had supplied two other models for fundamental political change. The first of these was a peaceful revolution (in the neutral sense of that term): the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. The second, armed invasion from abroad, was the achievement of the Prince of Orange in 1688–89: what used to be called ‘the Glorious Revolution’. While those who later conspired to overthrow the Williamite or Hanoverian hegemonies would develop or combine many different strategies, 1660 and 1688 remained, well into the eighteenth century, the potent historical examples.KeywordsEarly Eighteenth CenturyOriginal ContractMale HeirGlorious RevolutionArmed InvasionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Ireland's position as a kingdom in early modern Europe was, in some respects, unique, and this eccentricity sheds light upon the complexity of governing a multiple kingdom during the seventeenth century. The framework for looking at the way Ireland operated as a kingdom is provided, first by an article by Conrad Russell on ‘The British problem and the English civil war’ and secondly by an article by H. G. Koenigsberger entitled ‘Monarchies and parliaments in early modern Europe – dominium regale or dominium politicum et regale’. Russell listed six problems that faced multiple kingdoms: resentment at the king's absence, disposal of offices, sharing of war costs, trade and colonies, foreign intervention and religion. Koenigsberger used Sir John Fortescue's two phrases of the 1470s to distinguish between constitutional, or limited monarchies, and more authoritarian ones during the early modern period. Both these contributions are valuable in looking at the way the monarchy operated in Ireland because the application of the constitution there was deeply influenced by Ireland's position as part of a multiple kingdom and because Englishmen, looking at Ireland, wanted her to be like England, but, at the same time, did not wish her to exercise the type of independence that they claimed for England.

This chapter examines the development of the English drill manual from 1603-45, looking at the privately printed manuals that became popular in the second decade of the seventeenth century and the government's own drill manuals printed in the 1620s and 1630s. By the end of 1643, military practice had literally been put in press, with drill manuals becoming a permanent part of military training in England from this point forward. Military practice in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England owed a great debt to the school of war in the Netherlands. Dutch drill methods were most likely introduced into England by veterans returned from the Low Countries who became members of the Honourable Artillery Company. The successes and failures of training neophyte soldiers in the English Civil War have been well documented.Keywords: England; English Civil War; English drill manual; Honourable Artillery Company; Low Countries; Military practice; military training; Netherlands; privately printed manuals; school of war

Raymond A. Anselment. Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988. 233 pp. $32.50. - “The Muses Common-Weale“: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds., Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1988. vii + 223 pp. $28. - Volume 42 Issue 3

In 1603, for the first time, one individual came to power throughout the British Isles: James VI of Scotland and James I of England, Wales and Ireland. The male line of the Stuarts were expelled from Britain twice within the century, first in the British civil wars of the 1640s and early 1650s, generally known, inaccurately, as the English Civil War; and, secondly, in the civil war that began with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and ended when the Stuart cause in Ireland capitulated in 1691. In retrospect, the period is usually so dominated by the (English) Civil War of 1642–6, its causes, course and consequences, that it is difficult to appreciate that both the war and its results were far from inevitable. The war was certainly a major struggle: more than half the total number of battles fought on English soil involving more than 5,000 combatants were fought in 1642–51. Out of an English male population of about 1.5 million, over 80,000 died in combat and about another 100,000 of other causes linked to the war, principally disease. Possibly one in four English males served in the conflicts. Hostilities and casualties in the related struggles in Ireland and Scotland in 1638–51 were even heavier. In Scotland, where many prisoners were killed on the battlefield, about 6 per cent of the population died; in Ireland an even higher percentage, greater than that in the potato famine of the 1840s.

The English, and those Americans who regard themselves as the heirs to the traditions of seventeenth-century England, have often been inordinately proud of ‘their’ civil war: By common consent the rebellion against Charles I belongs to the handful of the ‘great revolutions’ of Europe and the West, cataclysms which appear to mark the turning of times and to signify some fundamental change in the condition of humanity.1 This ‘common consent’ has disappeared. A major trend of ‘revisionist’ scholarship has been to cut the English civil war down to size; to see it as a much more commonplace struggle than the term ‘great revolution’ suggests. Conrad Russell, in particular, has stressed that it was the Scots who first offered an effective challenge to Charles I and, furthermore, that the king’s problems have much in common with those faced by continental rulers. His approach exposes the fact that, within much of the British education system, courses described as ‘British history’ are really English history, considered in isolation from developments in continental Europe and in ignorance of events in Scotland and Ireland. Yet the ‘English civil war’ was only one of many struggles between European rulers and their peoples in the mid-seventeenth century: the French monarchy collapsed in the late 1640s, faced with resistance from many sections of the population in the complex risings known as the Frondes; within the Spanish monarchy there were revolts in Catalonia, Portugal, Naples and Sicily; there were severe, if less dramatic, tensions between rulers and ruled in Sweden, the United Provinces, and several German states. Like the king of Spain, Charles I of England ruled over multiple kingdoms and he faced revolt in all of them: England indeed was the last to rebel. It has thus been argued that there could have been no English civil war without the risings in Scotland in 1638 and in Ireland in 1641; the troubles of the 1640s are better understood as the ‘War of the Three Kingdoms’. The English civil war should be regarded as part of a ‘British problem’ which in turn was a manifestation of a ‘General European Crisis’; with this approach, many revisionists challenge the Whig or Marxist stress on the particularly advanced nature of the English. This chapter examines both the insights to be gained through interpreting the English civil war in these wider contexts, and some of the problems thereby encountered.

Early modern war writing was neither transparent nor impartial, but in many ways a continuation off the field of the battles begun on it. Whether a professional soldier, gentlemen volunteer, or nobleman from the very elite of Europe's aristocracy, an early modern war writer mustered whatever rhetorical muscle he could in order to shape his military memoirs, experiences of battle, or views on strategy into a persuasive whole. Demand for war writing grew throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and publishers increasingly cared more about the vividness of a report than they did about its accuracy. Eyewitness accounts were valued, but phrases about “the thundering shot of the canon [which] calleth me to my place” were no guarantee that the writer had actually been present at events. The newly founded grammar schools taught sixteenth-century schoolboys that powerful language was part and parcel of great military command: it enabled success on the battlefield by commanding respect and it gave the victor means to commemorate his victory and tactics. Julius Caesar was idolized as the greatest commander and orator of the ancient world, his Commentarii de bello gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War) (58-52 BCE) becoming a fixture on the Elizabethan school curriculum. Admiration for Caesar and warrior-orators like him forms part of the cultural background to the warrior-heroes of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's 1590s drama - men like Tamburlaine and Henry V, who fought as eloquently as they spoke and whose eloquence was integral to their command. This chapter considers early modern war writing in two sections: the first focuses on the sixteenth century, the second on the British Civil Wars.