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History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic. By Michael Murrin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. 371 pages.
Motivated in part by his teaching experience and in part by his desire to illuminate the military and historical reality which informed the early Renaissance epic, Michael Murrin brings together the first thoroughly documented, systematic analysis of the revolution in early modern warfare and the literary response to that crisis in epic narratives written between 1483 and 1610. Beyond the customary roster of epic poems which mark the movement of the form from Italy to England via France, Murrin expands the canon to include the long-neglected Iberian epics (Martorel, Camoes, Ercilla, Ona, Perez de Villagra, Latino, Rufo, Corte Real and Lope de Vega). Murrin examines the shift from romance to epic in light of two key issues: 1) the impact of the Gunpowder Revolution on warfare [from individual heroes who command "because they are heroes" to impersonalized war in which the officer is a hero "because he commands" (191)] and the poet's reaction to those changes; and 2) the poet's attraction to written history or history in...