Spenser's Art of War: Chivalric Allegory, Military Technology, and the Elizabethan Mock-Heroic Sensibility

Abstract

In the medieval romances single combat was the knightly norm. The Italian chivalric epics sought to adapt this convention to the ideals of the Renaissance courtier. In Il Cortegiano, Frederico Fregoso explains “that where the Courtyer is at skirmishe, or assault, or battaile upon the land, or in such other places of enterprise, he ought to worke the matter wisely in seperating himself from the multitude, and undertake his notable and bould feates which he hath to doe, with as little company as he can.“’ But such displays of panache had little place in the massed infantry tactics that dominated the actual battlefields of the sixteenth century. It was disciplined self-restraint that made the Swiss and Spanish pike phalanxes so formidable, relegating cavalry to secondary importance. The Italian courtierknights had been rudely humbled, after all, when Charles XII invaded Italy in 1494 and deployed his excellent artillery.