The Nimble Gunner and the Versatile Prince: Agility and the Early Modern Military Revolution

Abstract

When early modern military treatises, poems, and plays supplied an adjective to describe the gunner that adjective was usually “nimble.” In Fenton’s translation of Guicciardini’s account of the French invasion of Italy, Fenton writes that the French were “well furnished with artilleries and men most apt and nimble to manage them.”1 In The Art of Shooting in Great Ordnaunce (1587) Bourne notes that the gunners on a sailing vessel must be nimble: “Hee that is at the helme must bee sure to stirre [steer] steadye, and bee ruled by him that giveth the levell, and hee that giveth fire, must bee nimble, and readye at a suddayne.” Thomas Tomkis’s play Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue, and the Five Senses for Superiority (1607) has a character refer to soldiers as “all trained to the field, and nimble Gunners.” Elaborating on this description, the character adds that they are all “Marmosetts and long-taild Monkees.”KeywordsMilitary TreatiseEarly Modern PeriodMilitary TechnologyFrench ArmyMilitary DisciplineThese 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.