̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - armour

Arms and the man: how a culture of warfare shapes masculinity

amb206 — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 11:10:05 +0000

Brawls tend to take a familiar pattern. Verbal insults are traded and physical violence erupts. Something like this happened in the graveyard of a church in Florence on 30 March 1561. It began when a man named Niccolo di Piero Parenti called another man, Piero di Domenico, un asino (an ass). Both men soon drew their swords. Two others joined the fray – and Piero was wounded (his big toe was badly cut) leaving him unable to walk properly.

A remarkably detailed report of this encounter between a pair of hot-headed Florentines appear in the annals of the Otto di Guardia e Balia, records kept by the magistrates responsible for overseeing criminal affairs and law enforcement in Tuscany under the Medici, the dynasty which ruled this domain for close to three centuries.

Few scholars have investigated the archives of the Otto di Guardia which represent a vast and under explored historical source. But in 2015 Victoria Bartels, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, spent two months studying these hand-written records. It was an undertaking that required not just a grasp of 16th century Italian but the determination to track down the meanings of dozens of obscure or archaic terms – from verbal jibes to items of armour. She was amused to discover that the insult poltrone translates as ‘armchair’ and means something akin to slob.

Bartels’ research into the usage of weaponry in Renaissance Florence forms one strand of a dissertation in which she will explore the relationship between men and armour (as well as martial fashion trends) in the 16th century. Her quest to understand more about the ways in which men used these items as masculine signifiers during this period takes her on a voyage into art, literature and archival documents that have survived more than 400 years of history.

Late Renaissance Italian culture was characterised by warfare. ̽��ֱ��so-called Italian Wars involved much of Europe and a preoccupation with armed struggle and violence was reflected in pastimes (such as jousting) and in male deportment and dress. Weapons (like those drawn in the graveyard in March 1561) were prohibited in 16th century Florence in order to maintain peace. But exceptions could be made and the contents of the Otto di Guardia archives suggest that many were.

As well as holding records of thousands of incidents of violence, the Otto archives also contain a huge collection of letters called suppliche (supplications) that petition the Duke for exonerations, sentence reductions, or the granting of certain privileges. Among these documents are numerous letters in which men wrote to ask the Otto for permission to wear or carry, in public, weapons that were banned.

Speaking today, at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston, Bartels will show for the first time how these letters shine a light on the ways in which Renaissance men used weapons and armour in their daily lives to promote a masculine image – and how entrenched the notion of honour was in early modern society. ̽��ֱ��supplications are rich in information not only about what offensive and defensive arms men sought to wear but where in town they wished to go and how they wanted to be seen.

“ ̽��ֱ��supplications are very specific in what they set out – and these details are what make them so valuable. In order to be given permission to bear arms a man had to specify with some precision what items he wanted to carry, when he wanted to be able to carry them, and why. ̽��ֱ��letters include a plea from a Portuguese priest who asks for permission to carry a dagger, and his man servant to carry a sword, for protection against a rowdy group of farmers and youths who are demanding his removal from a small parish church,” says Bartels.

“As a historian interested in the cultural history of arms and armour, it’s fascinating to hold in my hands letters that describe a whole range of situations and discuss both the usage and significance of these objects. ̽��ֱ��accounts written by notaries follow a template of sorts. However, each story is tailored to the individual behind the request. Although the level of detail varies, these documents provide historical information that we might not otherwise encounter. Every piece of material included, or withheld for that matter, assists us in our quest to understand period norms.”

Successful supplicants were awarded licenses by the Otto. Bartels’ research in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze led to the discovery of one such license – a copy of a document issued in March 1557. ̽��ֱ��license in question was granted to a painter called Maestro Giovanni Fiammingo Pittore. It gives his address and age (35 years) and describes his appearance (“black hair, black bushy beard, white in the face, medium stature”) and gives him permission to carry “an armed jacket, sword, and dagger”.

It is interesting that Maestro Giovanni was a painter and, as such, attuned to the powerful symbolism of arms and armour. ̽��ֱ��irony of portraying civilians equipped for combat was not lost on another artist. In 1584 Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo wrote that “merchants and bankers who have never seen a drawn sword and who should probably appear with quill pens behind their ears, their gowns about them and their day-books in front of them, have themselves painted in armour holding generals’ batons” (translation by Carolyn Springer).

Portraits and inventories reveal how a culture of warfare, tied up with notions of chivalry revived from earlier times, permeated deep into the male psyche and into male fashion – especially among the elite. An inventory of the guardaroba (wardrobe) of Lorenzo de’ Medici, as shown by Mario Scalini, itemised various pieces of armour including the de facto ruler of Florence’s leg armour that he wore around the city for decorative purposes.

Jousts, melees, and other tournament games were fabulous excuses for donning steel. ̽��ֱ��author Antonio Bendinelli recorded a tournament held in 1574 for Don Juan of Austria. Bartels says: “He discussed the appearance of each contestant over a span of 45 pages, commenting on the colour and material of their armour, clothing, and plumes. In contrast, he summed up the actual joust in just 20 lines, as historians Richard and Juliet Barker have pointed out.”

Looking manly, and impressing the opposite sex, meant adopting a martial style. ̽��ֱ��celebrated Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini suggested that cavaliers wore mail armour to impress women and, in 1538, the artist himself is recorded as possessing an entire wardrobe of mail. However, being perceived as overly militaristic also had its drawbacks. In Baldassare Castiglione’s ̽��ֱ��Book of the Courtier (1528), a female character explains to a surly, overly militaristic man: "I should think that since you aren't at war at the moment and you are not engaged in fighting, it would be a good thing if you were to have yourself well greased and stowed away in a cupboard with all your fighting equipment, so that you avoid getting rustier than you are already."

For statesmen, the consequences of going without armour could be deadly. In 1476 a grim fate befell the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who was assassinated in one of the city’s churches. “We know from a courtier’s account that the Duke had decided against wearing his corazina [upper body armour] the morning of his death because it made him look portly,” says Bartels. “His decision was a revealingly human, but fatal, trade-off between form and function. His desire to look slim and dashing in public may have cost him his life.”

16th-century notions of gender welded manhood and masculinity with arms and armour. In a letter written in 1572, Antonio Serguidi noted that Duke Cosimo I wept with pride when he saw his youngest son Giovanni kitted out in armour, and holding a pike and mace. ̽��ֱ��putting on of armour was a mark of adulthood – and, perhaps, was a rite of passage with no return. ̽��ֱ��showy masculinity of martial dress, however, trod a delicate line along a sliding scale – with restraint at one end and acts of violence at the other.

Citing the scholars Lyndal Roper and John Tosh, Bartels suggests that a man’s level of manliness was never fixed but existed in a state of flux. “Violence, albeit in appropriate circumstances, appears to have been one method of demonstrating one’s masculinity. Yet to receive the benefits of this cultural capital, violent acts had to be performed publically under socially agreed terms, and especially in front of other men,” she says.

“Arms and armour seem to have been visible manifestations of this concept. Even if men didn’t fight, the objects they carried made it look as though they would and likely influenced their comportment and behaviour. Today we see these items in static museum displays – but to those who saw them worn their potentially lethal function was never in doubt. However, these same objects simultaneously conjured up notions of civility and chivalry, making the symbolism of arms and armour somewhat contradictory, similar to the period’s understanding of masculinity itself.”

̽��ֱ��gaining and defence of honour – whether for an individual, for family or for state – was the ultimate goal of the Renaissance man. ̽��ֱ��Otto di Guardia’s archives in Florence reveal that Niccolo, who engaged in a brawl with Piero almost exactly 455 years ago, was the only person to be charged with a crime. He was ordered to pay a fine for the insulting word he used and for the injury to his opponent’s foot. Though others joined the fracas, they were let off.

As Bartels explains: “Niccolo was convicted because he sullied the honour of Piero. As seen in other parts of Europe at this time, the authorities were sympathetic to fighters who were provoked by the spewing of verbal insults.”

Victoria Bartels will give her talk, ‘Men of Steel‘, today at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston. She is contributing to a session called ‘Encountering the Renaissance, Honoring Gary Radke III: Regulating and Shaping Gender and Sexuality’.

Inset images: Titian, Portrait of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, 1536-38 (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence); Parrying dagger with scabbard, Italy or Germany, ca. 1590 (Wallace Collection).

̽��ֱ��trappings of violence were embedded into the culture of 16th century Europe. Victoria Bartels, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, has conducted research in a Florentine archive to show how, even at a time when the bearing of arms was prohibited, men negotiated ways to sport their daggers and swords in public.

Violence, albeit in appropriate circumstances, appears to have been one method of demonstrating one’s masculinity. Yet to receive the benefits of this cultural capital, violent acts had to be performed publically under socially agreed terms, and especially in front of other men.

Victoria Bartels

Left: Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Gentleman with His Helmet on a Column, ca. 1555-56. Middle: Giovanni Battista Moroni, ̽��ֱ��Gentlemen in Pink, 1560, Palazzo Moroni, Bergamo. Right: Moretto da Brescia, Portrait of a Man, 1526, Oil on canvas.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Steel’s inner strength

lw355 — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 08:55:36 +0000

For thousands of years, steel has been used to make or do just about whatever we ask of it, from ancient suits of armour to modern skyscrapers. It has been mass produced since the mid-19th century, and global production of this most ubiquitous of materials currently stands at more than 1.4 billion metric tonnes per year.

Although all steel consists primarily of iron and carbon, it has an almost infinite variety of properties, depending on the type or amount of other elements added to the mix, or the temperature at which the steel is produced. This complexity makes steel extremely versatile, but also very difficult to understand and to design from the atomic level.

Professor Harry Bhadeshia of the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy has spent the past three decades researching the nature of steel to develop new alloys for a range of applications. One of these alloys, super bainite, has been licensed to Tata Steel and is currently being manufactured in the UK by the company for use as super-strong armour for military vehicles, as well as for other applications.

Bainite is a microstructure that forms when austenite, a high-temperature phase of steel, is cooled to temperatures between 250 and 500°C. ̽��ֱ��structure of austenite transforms as it cools, when slender crystals of iron incorporate themselves into the structure, and carbon compounds known as carbides form. ̽��ֱ��resulting bainite structure is very hard, but the carbides make it brittle and prone to cracking.

Working in collaboration with Professor Peter Brown of the Ministry of Defence (MoD), Bhadeshia and Dr Francisca Caballero in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy set out to refine and enhance the properties of bainite, originally for use in gun barrels.

Using precise modelling, they determined that there is no lower limit to the temperature at which bainite can be produced. By heat-treating it at temperatures around 200°C – closer to those that are normally used for baking cakes rather than for manufacturing steel – for 10 or more days, a new form results: super bainite. In addition, by adding elements such as silicon and molybdenum, carbides and harmful impurity phases are prevented from forming in the steel, reducing the likelihood of cracks.

Super bainite is strong – very strong. With a tensile strength of some 2.5 gigapascals, just one square metre can support a weight equivalent to the weight of 2.5 billion apples. It has a higher density of interfaces than any other type of metal, and is the world’s first bulk nanostructured metal.

̽��ֱ��strength of super bainite derives not only from the lack of carbides, but also from the tiny size of the iron crystals within its structure. Most types of steel are made up of very fine crystals: the smaller and finer the crystals, the stronger the resulting steel will be. ̽��ֱ��crystals in super bainite are between 20 and 40 nanometres thick, comparable to the width of carbon nanotubes. In comparison, the crystals in conventional bainite are between 200 and 500 nanometres thick.

“ ̽��ֱ��size of these crystals means that the steel is very difficult to deform, resulting in a more perfect structure,” said Bhadeshia. “And because of the very slow cooking process, which is actually quite simple, we can make the steel in very large quantities at low cost.”

̽��ֱ��cooking time resulted in a product with highly desirable characteristics, but the long wait meant that super bainite was only suitable for certain commercial applications. Supported by funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the MoD, Dr Carlos Mateo (also from Cambridge), Brown and Bhadeshia set out to accelerate the process. Through the use of kinetic and thermodynamic modelling, they found that by tailoring the composition of super bainite and heat-treating it at slightly higher temperatures, up to 250°C, it could be manufactured in a matter of hours rather than days, without any significant loss in performance.

In 2011, super bainite was licensed to Tata Steel, one of the world’s largest steel producers. Tata is now manufacturing the material at its facility at Port Talbot in South Wales, which is the first time that high-carbon steel has been manufactured on a large scale in the UK for 20 years. It is currently available commercially for civil applications such as automated teller machines for dispensing money, and as super-strong armour for use on military vehicles, under the name Pavise™.

Brown and his colleagues at the MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down determined that, counter-intuitively, perforations bored into super bainite made it even more capable of protecting vehicles from projectiles.

“ ̽��ֱ��ability of perforated super bainite steel to resist projectiles is at least twice that of conventional monolithic rolled homogeneous armour,” said Brown. “By introducing perforations into the steel, we create a large number of edges, which interrupt the path of incoming projectiles.”

Super bainite’s enormous strength makes it ideal for these types of applications, where strength and toughness are paramount. In addition to defence applications, there are spin-off high-carbon alloys for which the demand in Europe is up to 400,000 tonnes each year, for items such as springs, bearing cages and hand tools, where hard and thin sheets of steel are required. About 80% of these high-carbon steels that are being manufactured in Wales are now exported to markets worldwide.

“In addition to its superior ballistic properties, Pavise™ is manufactured in a far simpler way than other commercially available ballistic armour, and its performance comes from its unique properties,” said Kevin Edgar, Head of Marketing, Engineering Sectors at Tata Steel. “Other armours have long lead times owing to complex production routes, whereas we can produce this product alongside regular production runs, which means we can react more quickly to what the end users require and work with them – this flexibility gives us a real advantage.”

̽��ֱ��researchers in Bhadeshia’s group are now working with their partners in industry to address super bainite’s main weakness which, ironically, is its strength. “As it is so strong, super bainite cannot be welded, so it cannot be made into very large structures where pieces need to be joined together,” he said. “We are again working with MoD to further refine the structure so that it can be welded, without losing the characteristics that make it such a unique and high-performing material.”

A long-term collaboration between the ̽��ֱ�� and industry has resulted in a super-strong form of steel, which is now being manufactured in the UK for use as stronger and cheaper armour for front-line military vehicles.

By introducing perforations into the steel, we create a large number of edges, which interrupt the path of incoming projectiles

Peter Brown, MoD

Tata Steel

Perforations in super bainite make the material even better at protecting armoured vehicles from projectiles

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