War and Society in Early Modern Europe

The historiography of early modern warfare has shown the ways in which armed forces reflect the societies that they serve, and it has stimulated debates about the relationship between war and state-formation.

However, these debates have often neglected the first-person perspective of soldiers who participated in such wars, the contribution of gender to the shaping of warfare, and the ways in which wars were narrated and justified by contemporaries in imaginative literature.

This conference will explore a range of related questions:

• To what extent is the development of the modern nationstate related to changing practices in early modern warfare?
• How did imaginative literature represent armed conflict, and what was the relationship between literary practices and the early modern state?
• How does a focus on gender change our understanding of state formation, warfare, and literary representations of conflict in the early modern period?

Keynote Speakers:
Peter H. Wilson (All Souls, University of Oxford)
Sofie Kluge (University of Southern Denmark)

The conference is sponsored by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)