I was initially contacted by Kate Hammond at Brill about the vague subject of military manuals, and we met to chat about it at Leeds in 2018. Other responsibilities kept me away, until the summer of 2020, when so many of us were stuck at home (and I was finishing off other things). My initial goal had been to put together a much more expansive, global collection of papers on military manuals and adjacent texts from across the medieval world. A quick glance at the table of contents will reveal that this goal was not realized. There are no chapters on the Islamic world, but one from parts even further east, and comparatively few from the western Mediterranean. Nevertheless, this is not meant as a last word on the subject, and perhaps only the first – or second or third. I hope others might be inspired by these great and underappreciated texts to give them more of the love that they deserve. I should note too, I hope that this love extends not just to the realm of military history, but literary studies too, a point James Chlup and I made in our co-edited volume on Greek and Roman military manuals.
A special thanks too to all the contributors. Not all those I asked were able to contribute, and even some of those who initially said yes were not able to submit a chapter in the end. I want to thank them regardless for agreeing to take part. For those who did stick around until the end, my heartfelt thanks at making this book become reality. This includes those who came in at the beginning and those who came in at the end. Some had some significant challenges along the way, and I thank you wholeheartedly for sticking with this.
The team at Brill deserve thanks for all their hard work, Kate Hammond and later Marcella Mulder especially, for believing in this book. Thanks too to the reviewers for their excellent feedback. To everyone else at Brill who made this book possible, thank you. I want to thank my colleagues at the University of Winnipeg as well, who continue to be supportive in all sorts of different ways.
There is another important group I want to thank. I have benefitted immensely from a reading group, which formed during the pandemic, and which concentrated on Roman and Byzantine agricultural manuals. Although texts like Columella’s On Agriculture and the Geoponika might seem far removed from the issues and interests of the writers of military manuals, they often exhibit the same struggle between a work’s practical and theoretical value. Just as an agricultural writer might write extensively about farming while boasting little-to-no real experience, so might a military writer have no real experience of warfare firsthand, let alone at the head of an army. Here, I want to thank the members of that group, especially the organizers Vicky Austen and David
Finally, a big thanks to my family, both those here in Winnipeg but also the extended family in Canada, the UK, and beyond. Because my final grandparent (my 97-year-old grandmother Nan, my “roomie”) died just before I sent this off to the press, I dedicate this book to her memory.