Edited by Matthew Woodcock and Cian O’ Mahony, Early Modern Military Identities uncovers how early modern fighting men viewed and represented themselves, and how they were perceived and fashioned by others. The contributions, drawn from papers presented at conferences and panels on this theme held in Cork and Albuquerque, concentrate on English, Irish, and Anglo-Irish fighting men active between the 1560s and 1630s. In the last sixty years, much scholarly attention has been devoted to the tactical, technological, political, and social implications of the so-called early modern Military Revolution, but there has been comparatively little examination of the impact of such changes in perceptions of the actual soldiers. Taking a discernibly interdisciplinary approach, Woodcock and O'Mahony thus aim to draw “much-needed attention to the complex, shifting ontology of both early modern soldiery and soldiers” (3).

The first part of the book explores key models that were used in the construction of early modern military identities. David Trim examines masculinity and the performance of honorable/courageous deeds, demonstrating ways that gender identities are socially constructed and performative. Although Trim focuses on masculinity, future scholars might (as Matthew Woodcock notes in the introduction) develop his approach to better understand female roles and identities in early modern warfare. Woodcock's own contribution unpacks the model provided by Julius Caesar's Commentaries for the “writing fighting man” (18). Of note is Woodcock's observation that Caesar's text was increasingly accompanied by examples from contemporary formations or battles that elucidated Roman practices. Scholarship on the Military Revolution has frequently acknowledged the impact of classical literature on early modern military tactics but few have pondered how the latter influenced understandings of classical history and literature. O'Mahony's chapter continues the literary theme with a study of the scholarly works of the Norfolk clergyman Ralph Knevet. O'Mahony's claim that John Cruso, the Norwich militiaman who was known to Knevet and subsequently published military manuals, had military experience in the Low Countries is mistaken. Despite the occasional assumption from other scholars that Cruso must have fought in the Low Countries, no evidence for this has ever come to light. However, Cruso's lack of experience actually adds to O'Mahony's argument that those with no combat experience still took an interest in international military activities and linked these to regional and national endeavors to develop national and cultural identities. Philip Major's chapter centers on the military literature that was passed around the circles dominated by senior veterans of the wars on the European mainland to influence geopolitical decision making. Major reveals how one such veteran, Thomas, first Lord Fairfax, took advantage of this process by compiling a manuscript tract (“The Highway to Heidelberg”) that cultivated his family's military reputation to promote his self-advancement.

The second section consists of five chapters examining military identities in Ireland. There are chapters from Angela Andreani and Andrew Hadfield on military clergyman in late sixteenth-century Ireland; Ruth Canning on the military identity propagated among the lords descended from Ireland's Anglo-Norman conquerors (the “Old English”); David Edwards on the 1615 Latin poem Ormonius, written for Thomas Butler (tenth Earl of Ormond); James O'Neill on the military identities and reputations of both the Gaelic and English forces during the Nine Years’ War; and (a personal favorite) Clodagh Tait on how wounded bodies were used to display military identities. These all give the opportunity to explore what was unique about Irish military identities and, accordingly, will complement other studies of military identities from across the British Isles, such as Steve Murdoch and Andrew Mackillop's edited volume Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experiences c.1550–1900 (2002). Simultaneously, these chapters engage with broader subjects. There is a reminder that sermons not only provide an insight into confessionalism but, because they were performative pieces, they are also comparative with other literary sources. Familial military identity and sacrifices on the battlefield were as important for Patrick Plunkett, seventh Earl of Dunsany, as they were for Thomas, first Baron Fairfax, while Ormond's sense of honor and aristocratic identity illustrates perfectly the points raised in Trim's chapter. The impact of modern political and social agendas on the interpretations of history and the importance of historical and cultural contexts to understanding emotions in the past are vividly present in O'Neill's and Tait's contributions, respectively.

The decision to dedicate the third and final part to military identities on the stage is fully justified by Vimala Pasupathi and Benjamin Armintor's revelation that stative constructions about soldiers were more common in drama than any other printed works. Pasupathi and Armintor's chapter, based on data-mining of an electronic corpus of 1,244 dramatic works published between 1550 and 1642, follows contributions from Adam McKeown on the “braggart soldier” in Shakespeare's Othello and Andrew Hiscock on Thomas Middleton's playhouse dramas and civic entertainments. All demonstrate how dramatic representations of soldiers reflected and informed public perceptions and contemporary concerns. An increased representation of veterans during wartime years was matched by a spike in representations of counterfeit soldiers in peacetime years. Themes raised in Tait's and O'Neill's chapters on the human costs of war, the huge strains that large numbers of wounded and unemployed veterans placed on embryonic welfare systems, and the ingratitude of the state toward those formerly in its service all loom large across this section. It is hard to escape the conclusion, as McKeown observes, that contemporaries valued “a certain kind of martial identity that works best when, as in the case of Sidney, it does not survive the battlefield” (234). The wider difficulties of establishing the boundaries of the military profession also form a common thread, while McKeown highlights how the ideas expressed by military theorists such as Barnaby Rich and George Whetstone infiltrated Shakespeare's plays, enabling military manuals to reach a much wider audience beyond practitioners and armchair military enthusiasts.

There are, of course, many other subjects that could have been covered in Early Modern Military Identities. As Woodcock readily admits, the selection on offer is determined by the contributors’ expertise and interests, but he provides a thought-provoking afterword suggesting ways that military identities and interdisciplinary studies of warfare in the early modern period may be further investigated by other scholars. I hope that this baton is seized.

There is one area where I feel the volume sells itself short. In his introduction, Woodcock remarks on the difficulty of equating military identities with occupational identities, based on the permeable boundaries between military and civilian spheres. However, scholars such as Alexandra Shepard in Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (2006) have demonstrated how the occupational identifiers adopted by early modern men masked the plethora of ways that they actually spent their labors. Why then should military identities be viewed any differently than other occupational identities? It is with an appreciation of this point that the importance of a volume like Early Modern Identities becomes apparent.