De Re Militari Presidential Message

Welcome to De Re Militari.  It is an honor to serve as President of De Re.  These are exciting times for medieval military history, and the growth of De Re is from one perspective only a symptom of a general flourishing of medieval military scholarship.  But from another perspective, our organization has been a crucial catalyst in the process of growth.  Our Kalamazoo sessions, so ably organized by the tireless Kelly DeVries, demonstrate each year the popularity of our field, and both showcase some of the best work currently being done and provide a forum for lively, friendly debates.  The De Re journal, The Journal of Medieval Military History, edited by Kelly and Cliff Rogers, launches this year, expanding our exposure even further.  And this website, under the direction of Peter Konieczny, is a rich gateway to a growing collection of articles, reviews, and primary sources for medieval military history.

I see two major tasks for historians in our field over the next several years.  The first is obvious, and would apply to any specialist group.  We must continue to foster a wide range of well-researched, theoretically sophisticated work in our field.  But the second demands that I deploy the inevitable Mandatory Military Metaphor (MMM).  The last twenty years has seen medieval military historians re-conquer a piece of legitimate academic territory, after a period of exile.  We now have a place.  But this should not satisfy us.  Given the centrality of military organization and action to medieval European social structure, politics, and culture, we should penetrate more effectively the territories of other specialties.  Our research and publications should aim at making it impossible to write social, political, economic or cultural history of the Middle Ages without reference to the military element in those histories.  Who knows, perhaps we can even penetrate the stony bastion of historicist literary criticism.  Related campaigns (ones I am particularly interested in) should expand the geographic and temporal scope of our impact, placing medieval European military history in a broader comparative and developmental context.  Histories of medieval warfare globally and of classical and especially early modern warfare in Europe (and beyond) will be better when their medieval connections are better known.

So welcome again to De Re Militari.  Explore our website, join our society, receive our journal. Come to our sessions.  If you’re already doing all this, keep it up.  History is a collective enterprise, and this is our part of it.

Stephen Morillo

President, De Re Militari