Reframing the Conversation on Medieval Military Strategy

In 2010, Beatrice Heuser published a book entitled Thinking War: The Evolution of Strategy from Antiquity to the Present. In his review in the Journal of Military History, Andrew Lambert called the book “sophisticated and wise” – “epic,” even. But Heuser has little to say about the Middle Ages, covering the entire period in just four pages. She argues that there was “little medieval literature of relevance” to her book because, “how to wage war...was...for a thousand years largely confined to the work of Vegetius.” Apparently, after De re militari, the next “text on warfare that is no longer either a historical treatise or a legal one, nor a copy of Vegetius,” is Bouvet's 1385 Tree of Battles. She then asks the begged question: “Why was there relatively little writing on the way to wage war in the Middle Ages?” The answer she considers “perhaps the most conclusive” is that, because God determined the outcome of war, there was little use speculating how to influence it. She is thus compelled to conclude that there was little intellectual basis for strategy in the Middle Ages

Ancient history · Art · Cognitive reframing · Conversation · EPIC · Literature · Middle Ages · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Byzantine Studies and History · Classics · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Medieval History and Crusades · Psychology · Social Psychology

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