Preface

Summary

I should make it clear from the outset that, notwithstanding the subtitle Concerns and Preoccupations given to this volume, none of the essays presented here focus on the major anxieties besetting those living in the fifteenth century. Fears about mortality, the after-life and salvation of souls are barely touched upon; and worries about plague and periodic epidemics are to have a themed volume of their own (Society in an Age of Plague) in 2013. Rather, the eight authors here have each contributed fresh views about the preoccupations of men and women at various levels of society, revealing how those concerns may have decided their actions, for better or worse. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century it is all too easy to look back 600 years and assume that events then were somehow preordained, emerging from the clear-sighted intentions of the participants. We sometimes take it as read that men were ambitious, firmly in control of their destinies and single-mindedly in pursuit of their aims, when we should bear in mind that they were just as fallible, insecure and prone to change their minds as we are.

In looking at fifteenth-century translations into English of Vegetius' De re militari, Christopher Allmand shows first of all how the translators needed to overcome the difficulties arising from changes in terminology and the precise meaning of words since the fourth century, so as to fit the practical purposes of military commanders of their own times.