MILITARY HISTORY OF MIDDLE AGES

The course is one of the main activities of the Master's degree course in History from the Middle Ages to the Contemporary Age, which prepares students to specialize in European and extra-European history through a full mastery of the epistemological foundations of historiographic practice and of the methodologies of investigation of different types of sources, including original ones. The course aims at presenting the various historical dimension of warfare.The emphasis is more on the institutional and social aspects than on the purely technical ones, in order to understand the close interrelations between military institutions and society.The course is addressed in particular to those students who intend to analyze phenomena related to war in a comparative perspective over time and across space.

Students are expected to understand both the specifics of military history and its importance to understand the more general dynamics of society and the state

Ability to read English texts

The course deals with warfare from variuos points of view, institutional, technological, social and political as well. A long term approach, from the late middle ages to the First World War, will allow to examine wars' structural changes and their various implications. The second part of the course will focus on some conflicts that took place in different areas of Eurasia in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The cases of the Flanders War (1568-1648), the Long War fought between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburgs (1593-1604) and the two Japanese invasion campaigns in Korea, with the intervention of the Ming, in the 1590s will be considered. The comparison aims to highlight similarities and differences considering the different social, economic, and state structures engaged. The content of the course therefore is situated within the broader framework of modern history from a comparative perspective.Main topics:

Changes of warfare between the late middle ages to the early modern times
A military revolution?
State and war in Europe 1400-1900
The Great War, 1914-18
A tale of three wars:
The War of Flanders(1568-1648)
The Long Ottoman-Habsburg War (1593-1606)
The Japanese-Sino-Korean War (1592-98)

J. Keegan, Il volto della battaglia. Azincourt, Waterloo, La Somme, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 2010;
J. Keegan, La prima guerra mondiale. Una storia politico-militare, Roma, carocci, 2004;
J. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture, Boulder, Basic Books, 2003
G. Parker, La rivoluzione militare. Le innovazioni militari e il sorgere dell'Occidente, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1999;
F. Tallett, War and Society in Early Modern Europe: 1495-1715, London, Routledge, 1992;
The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on The Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe, ed. by C.J. Rogers, Boulton, Westview 1995;
J. Chagniot, Guerre et societe a l'epoque moderne, Paris, Puf, 2001;
I. Glete, La guerra sul mare, 1500-1650, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2010;
La Guerra italo-austriaca (1915-18), a cura di N. Labanca e O. Ueberegger, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2014;
G. Breccia, 1915: l’Italia va in trincea, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2015;
M. Isnenghi e G. Rochat, La Grande Guerra, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2008;
A. Monticone, Gli italiani in uniforme 1915-1918, Bari, Laterza, 1972;
P. Melograni, Storia politica della Grande Guerra 1915-1918, Bari, Laterza, 1969
La Prima Guerra Mondiale, a cura di A. Gibelli, Torino, Einaudi, 2007
G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, Cambridge, CUP, 1973
J. Tracy, Balkan Wars, Lanham, Rowman and Littkefield, 2016
S. Hawley, The Imjin War, Seoul, Conquistador Press, 2014

Students are expected to actively participate in class, deliver a written paper on topics examined in the course.
Students are requested to attend classes, for they will partly have a workshop-style character. Attending students must to make a presentation in class and write a paper. Non attending students must to read two texts assigned by the teacher and to present two papers.
Evaluation criteria:
Attending 20%
Presentation 40%
Paper 40%

Frontal lectures and active participation of students

Italian

written and oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "International cooperation" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development