Event Details

Dr Patrick Brugh (Johns Hopkins University) "Call yourselves 'cannonry' instead of 'chivalry'": Aesthetic Dissonance and Gender Trouble in the Age of Gunpowder Warfare

The Killing at a Distance project, a collaboration between the Centre for War and Diplomacy and The Ruskin at Lancaster University, takes Ruskin’s view on the dehumanising impact of modern technologies in his essay on war as a starting point for an exhibition and related events programme.

During the earliest days of gunpowder warfare in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a tension grew between the narratives of war and masculinity rooted in medieval martial arts and the evolving material realities and textual representations of guns on and off the battlefield. The conflict, an aesthetic dissonance, lasted over 300 years as artists, writers, and military theorists attempted to join gunpowder technology to the cultural root stock of European military traditions, both tactical and cultural. In the process, authors and artists wrestled with emerging narratives and experiences of war that were out of sync with the ones they had inherited from the Middle Ages. By the middle of the seventeenth century, as the Thirty Years War raged across the continent, new narratives of what John Ruskin might call "cannonry" had supplanted the medieval "chivalry." It was not as smooth as Ruskin imagined. This talk combines an overview of the narrative turmoil found in German military literature from 1400-1700 with a survey of the challenges arising from a methodology that combines feminist theory, literary theory, and military history. Finally, it asks how such a methodology can help us read the technologies of war today against the cultural reactions that try to frame them.

Dr. Patrick Brugh holds a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. His research has won funding awards from the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD, the Herzog August Bibliothek (Germany), and the Newberry Library (Chicago). His recent monograph, Gunpowder, Masculinity, and Warfare in German Texts (1400-1700) explores the gendered, ethical, and aesthetic upheaval tied the advent of gunpowder warfare in German-speaking lands. Dr. Brugh is the Director of Operations for the Life Design Lab at Johns Hopkins University, an interdisciplinary department that uses design thinking skills and research to help students,staff, and faculty fulfil their life purpose regardless of their majors,backgrounds, or social capital.