Peter Sposato's book focuses on the complex of chivalry, honor, and violence, analyzed by reference to biographies, archival records, and literature from thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Florence. The subtitle intentionally evokes Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999) by Richard Kaeuper, Sposato's doctoral supervisor, and Samuel Claussen's Chivalry and Violence in Late Medieval Castile (2020), both of whose influence Sposato acknowledges.
Chapter 1 deals with “Chivalry and Honor Violence,” projecting personal and familial honor, transported by contemporary literature; chapter 2 elaborates on “Chivalry and Social Violence,” collective or class-identificatory honor, illustrated by archival case reports; chapter 3 discusses Brunetto Latini's Il tesoretto as a case study in chivalric reform—an intellectual's reeducation program to curb the fighter's antisocial aggression without diminishing his effectiveness—and chapter 4 lists out the chivalric elite participating in Florence's wars in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The epilogue describes the life of Buonaccorso Pitti (1354–1432), reconstructed knight on the Latini template, though his commercial wealth had to subsidize his military misadventures.
Sposato joins in the Kaeupernican view of the chivalric elite engaging in ideologically driven performative violence also off the battlefield, in contrast to the (Maurice) Keensian conception of chivalry as peaceable in a civilian context, with chivalric violence limited to battle. The book thus seeks to show the self-defined chivalric elite of Florence as ideologically motivated to engage in proscribed performative violence, while continuing to participate in Florence's wars in senior military roles despite laws discriminating against them.
Forged in the Shadow of Mars should be interesting to researchers in the subject matter even if, or especially if, their geographic focus is different. The analysis confirms Florentine pretenders to knightly status routinely engaged in such pedestrian money-making enterprises as banking or commerce, while north of the Alps, such activities were not (yet) considered status-compatible, and knights looked to spoils from military ventures as primary source of wealth. Conversely, commoner councillors of German cities easily associated with the concepts of honor, ruling, fighting, and military leadership, as shown by B. Ann Tlusty's The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany: Civic Duty and the Right of Arms (2011), another city-focused monograph, drawing on the late medieval Augsburg archives. Ultramontane ruling burgher elites sought arrangement with their equally prickly nobility, as the Bernese Twingherrenstreit exemplifies. Italian cities’ excluding their magnates from politics contributed to the succession of civil wars, revolutions, coups, signorie, and popolo governments.
As surely intended, Sposato's exegesis provokes further questions: was honor understood as a binary property, that one had or lost, or as—in Gerhard Fouquet's phrase—“Ehrkapital,” an asset that can be grown and cumulated? If so, was this asset meant to be leveraged, and for what purpose? Was it used to secure higher-ranking military command, which in turn entitled one to a privileged distribution of campaign spoils, be that in the service of Florence or, as many scions of the Florentine chivalric elite evidently did, of foreign kings and princes? How typical was the life of Buonaccorso Pitti, moving easily and sure-footedly between performative chivalric violence and domesticated, popolo grasso-compatible conduct, depending on the setting?
So far as the violence itself is concerned, it was demonstrably real, and the chivalric elite were among the perpetrators. But was it distinctive? The cited case reports at times recall Benvenuto Cellini's escapades. Sposato forcefully argues it was distinctive, qualitatively and quantitatively, on the basis of academic siftings of the voluminous if unstructured court records—in itself yeoman's work; but there is admittedly scope for more science, especially—and crucially—by reference at any given time to the broader political context in which it occurred. Even today, violent acts committed by one group may be ascribed to ideology, while in other groups the same acts are lone-wolf events. Ultimately, the witnesses’ progressively rotelike repetition of the charges, their vagueness, and the tone of scandalized indignation make one join in Sposato's caution; one gains the impression that the factuality of the violence increasingly grew irrelevant, the alleged perpetrators apparently not bothering to deny or justify them. There is no better proof for the ideological nature of chivalric violence.
