Most macronarratives of military revolution in Europe accept the proposition that the consolidation of power in the early modern state entailed the demilitarization of urban populations, who as a result were subjected to “ever greater efforts at disciplining and policing” by their sovereign rulers (p. 5). Sidelined by technological advances and the superior force of professional armies, civic militias lost their functions until only a ceremonial vestige of martial culture remained. By the close of the sixteenth century, military life had segregated from the civilian sphere; the age of the citizen-soldier, celebrated by Niccoló Machiavelli, was long gone.

That characterization held up well enough in the absence of historical scholarship on weapons culture in the Holy Roman Empire—a gap that this superb monograph helps to fill. Based on her exhaustive research on Imperial cities in southern Germany, B. Ann Tlusty argues that long before Machiavelli and well into the eighteenth century, a “martial ethic” pervaded society and politics in German cities, a system of norms, symbols, and functions that defined all inhabitants in relation to communal polity, its policing, and defense. At its core stood an ideal of the household as the basic unit of military muster, a zone of peace under the authority of an autonomous male citizen, whose status obligated him to keep weapons and the right to bear them. Civilian and military identities were intertwined; achievements or failures in either domain implicated both.

None of this will surprise historians of the premodern urbanism. But as Tlusty shows, reality often departed from the legal norm. Not every eligible male could afford weapons; some citizens shirked guard duty. More fundamentally, the martial ethic endorsed a right to self-defense that frequently interfered with civic order. Insults escalated more easily to bloodshed; careless gun owners killed accidentally. For civic authorities, one solution to this problem was to punish bad behavior of all kinds—not just shirking or brawling but any deviation from the ideal of citizen masculinity, such as financial irresponsibility—by forbidding the offender to bear arms, or more vividly by forcing him to carry a dagger with its tip broken off, an especially humiliating form of symbolic emasculation. But the civic defense also depended on the martial ethic, and to that end civic authorities also encouraged training in martial arts, sharpshooting competitions, and the like. Most weapons bans, accordingly, were individual, temporary, and rarely curtailed political freedoms. General bans against weapons were rare and meant to combat rebellion or poaching, typically, not to suppress owning weapons per se.

Old as it was and long though it lasted, the martial ethic was neither unchanging nor immune to challenge. Patterns of change emerge most clearly from the chapters in which Tlusty analyzes the relationship between weapons culture and honor, gender, and social boundaries. In the heyday of urban weapons culture, formal duels were common and governed by precise rules of conduct. In the seventeenth century, however, affairs of honor among burghers came under pressure from those who wished to assert an aristocratic monopoly over its practices. Heavier restrictions on carrying a blade may also account for a sharp decline in the number of sword-owning households, which paralleled an increase in ownership of firearms. Technological change, in other words, affected martial culture profoundly. So, too, did gender: in her analysis of judicial fines, Tlusty argues that women were far less likely to engage in bloodletting, not necessarily because they were less violent, but because women had so thoroughly internalized the gendered norms of weapons culture that they eschewed sharp, “masculine” tools in favor of blunt objects that were forbidden to men—sand buckets, ladder rungs, broomsticks. Just as weapons culture was subject to change, similarly, the association between arms-bearing and citizenship was not ironclad. By participating in martial culture, Jews, peasants, students, and clergy all challenged basic assumptions underlying the association between arms-bearing and political freedom.

This excellent study should dispel any notion that the military revolution demilitarized early modern cities in the seventeenth century. On the contrary, the martial ethic of southern German towns long anticipated the “social militarization” that Otto Büsch once placed in the eighteenth century. But the very ubiquity of weapons culture raises questions of definition. For the most part, Tlusty treats the martial ethic in relation to the urban society, but most of her evidence comes from militarily self-governing Imperial cities. Did the martial ethic develop as fully in less autonomous cities? Just as arms-bearing was never the exclusive preserve of citizen-soldiers, moreover, weapons were at least as widely owned in the countryside. Communally organized rural militias were scattered throughout the southern German landscape, not to mention Switzerland, regions that also exhibited attributes of the martial ethic. To what extent, one wonders, did the martial ethic express the structures, found both in rural and urban settings, that Peter Blickle associated with early modern communalism?

Whatever the answers to these questions, Tlusty's broader point holds: no account of military revolution is complete that neglects the view from the street. In time, responsibility for local defense was indeed taken from local hands; eventually, citizens stopped parading about with swords. Demilitarization was not accomplished until the eighteenth century, however, long after the victory of standing armies had chased urban militias from the field of battle. But the weapons culture of early modern Germany, with its fusion of masculine power with martial skill, endured. Tlusty is correct to suggest that historians of military cultures elsewhere in Europe have much to learn from the experience of early modern Germany's urban militias.