Miguel Martínez - "Front Lines" - Frederick A. de Armas

Miguel Martínez discusses Front Lines: Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World. He will be joined in conversation by Frederick A. de Armas.

At the Co-op

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About the book: In Front Lines, Miguel Martínez documents the literary practices of imperial Spain's common soldiers. Against all odds, these Spanish soldiers produced, distributed, and consumed a remarkably innovative set of works on war that have been almost completely neglected in literary and historical scholarship. The soldiers of Italian garrisons and North African presidios, on colonial American frontiers and in the traveling military camps of northern Europe read and wrote epic poems, chronicles, ballads, pamphlets, and autobiographies—the stories of the very same wars in which they participated as rank-and-file fighters and witnesses. The vast network of agents and spaces articulated around the military institutions of an ever-expanding and struggling Spanish empire facilitated the global circulation of these textual materials, creating a soldierly republic of letters that bridged the Old and the many New Worlds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Martínez asserts that these writing soldiers played a key role in the shaping of Renaissance literary culture, which for its part gave to them the language and forms with which to question received notions of the social logic of warfare, the ethics of violence, and the legitimacy of imperial aggression. Soldierly writing often voiced criticism of established hierarchies and exploitative working conditions, forging solidarities among the troops that often led to mutiny and massive desertion. It is the perspective of these soldiers that grounds Front Lines, a cultural history of Spain's imperial wars as told by the common men who fought them.

About the author: Miguel Martínez (PhD, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 2010) is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Chicago. He writes and teaches on the cultural and literary histories of early modern Iberia and its colonial worlds. He is the author of articles and book chapters on topics such as war writing, book history, epic poetry, and popular culture. His book Front Lines: Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) documents the literary practices of imperial Spain's common soldiers. 

About the interlocutor: Frederick A. de Armas is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in Romance Languages and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, where he has also served as Chair of the Department and is now Director of Graduate Studies. He has served as President of the Cervantes Society of America and is now President of AISO (Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro). He has been awarded several NEH Fellowships and has directed several NEH Seminars. He is the author of many books and essays.