De Re Militari | Book
Reviews
Journal of the Armour Research Society
Volume 1 (2005), 105pp. ISSN 1557-1297. US$35 ($39 international).
This new entry into the relatively limited number of periodicals on arms and armor is a welcome addition. Their mandate is to cover “historical armour, weapons, warfare, tournaments, hunting, and martial textiles from all cultures, spanning ancient civilizations up to an including the pre-modern period.” This breadth should serve them well, although the first volume is all European and later medieval to early modern, with one exception.
Many Eliglish-speaking readers may know of the venerable British Journal of the Arms and Armour Society and possibly of Arms & Armour (successor of the Royal Armouries Yearbook – that is being pushed fairly aggressively by Manley Publishing), but only serious academics or armour researchers are likely to know of or have access to the German Waffen- und Kostumekunde or the recently revived Gladius from Spain. The Journal of the Armour Research Society (JARS) may be happily considered in the same breath as these other more established journals, at least based upon this, their inaugural volume. Time will tell if the JARS can keep up a consistent product, but if the future ones are as competent as this one or better, they should do well.
This first volume contains five substantial articles, from effigy studies to text-based analysis of armor making and owning, a conservator’s story of repair, and an article on the functionality of the armor itself as a defensive technology. Dirk Breiding, assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art offers a Foreword – providing JARS with a certain imprimatur – pointing out that the Armour Research Society (ARS) and the JARS now provide the a key scholarly venue in North America for the study of arms and armor. The organization of the ARS is centered in Chicago, although it appears to be entirely independent of any museum (the Harding collection at the Art Institute of Chicago would have seemed to be the obvious candidate). It does, however, seem to have international support of people from across the US and the UK (which may suggest why they chose the British spelling of ‘armour’ in their title – an odd choice for a US publication, but perhaps since all other journals in the world use armour, they chose to as well).
The articles in the volume are all relatively scholarly, although range from observations to truly in-depth analyses and source study. Tobias E. Capwell’s “Observations on the Armour Depicted on Three Mid-15th-century Military Effigies in the Kirk of St. Nicholas, Aberdeen,” is an interesting read, but does have a certain ‘here are my travel snapshots’ feel about it, and is quite slim on external references. By comparison, Pierre Terjanian’s “The Armourers of Cologne: Organization and Export Markets of a Foremost European Armor[sic]-making Center (1391-1660)” is a masterfully researched article. Two ‘practical’ articles then compliment these more analytical ones: Simon Metcalf provides a fascinating conservationists report on “The Treatment on an Arm Guard from the Armoury of Shah Shuja: Ethical Repair and in situ documentation in Miniature” on how he was tasked to replace missing links in mail connecting bands of an 18th-century Afghan (Sikh) armor for the V&A in London (they stamped ‘VA’ on each replacement link!); and Douglas W. Strong analyzes “The Glancing Surface and Its Effect on 14th-century Armour,” offering a deeper understanding of the idea of the glancing blow and drawing our attention to stop ribs and rolled edges and their functions in the earlier period of full plate. Finally, an excellent article by Robert Reed on “The Howard Books, Part II: Armour Loans and Lists,” rounds out the volume, and offers a considered analysis of some 15th century account books of John Howard, and even more importantly, prints a complete 31-page transcription of these lists as an addendum to the article. [Readers may wondering how this could be a “Part II” article in the first volume of a new journal; part I appeared in the Journal of the Mail Research Society, vol. 1 (2003)]
The range of authors – whose affiliations are interestingly not given – makes the JARS an important journal in that it is a place for both established museum curators and unaffiliated independent scholars (and dare we even say ‘aficionados’ or ‘connoisseurs’ in this day and age?) to place their work. This reviewer encourages the JARS editor to maintain high standards for the articles, but also to continue in their vein of not necessarily requiring credentials and a position at a major museum collection of arms and armor. If interesting differences of opinion arise in the course of publishing an article, perhaps future issues could have a ‘Responses’ section. I would also suggest that the editors seek out the nice range of types of articles this first volume has published; a section on evidence, some on practical things, and documentary research would make wonderful continuing sections.
The production quality of the volume is pretty good: it is an 8.5x11 inch volume on heavyweight matte paper and uses a glossy card cover with glued binding. Time will tell whether the glue is durable, but the format offers a great deal of flexibility in the size of each volume (they will not be tied to page multiples of 16, for example, as other binding and production methods might require). The illustrations throughout are large and mostly high-fidelity (a few are slightly pixilated, but one hopes this is an occasional growing pain of the layout editor) – excellent quality and clarity, in fact, given the non-glossy paper. The page layout is single column with footnotes, clearly done with desktop publishing software, and one could fault the page designers for rather uncreative and non-standardized illustration layout, but these critiques should not distract from good information in the articles.
The JARS will suffer somewhat for the moment in terms of distribution in that they do not appear to be formally affiliated with any publisher. On one hand this may allow them to continue through the devoted offices of its members; on the other hand, it may hamper both their exposure and order fulfillment. But if their first issue is representative, we can hope that more and equally successful issues are to follow; the second issue should be appearing imminently, so we shall see.
For more information, see www.armourresearchsociety.org