The World of the Siege

At first sight, the importance of sieges in early modern warfare seems well established. A contemporary British military man stated in 1677 that commanders made 'war more like foxes, than like lyons; and you will have twenty sieges for one battell.' Some important explorations of the subject have been undertaken more recently from the fields of history of technology, art-history and the 'new military history'. Yet, so far, actual events of siege and the great mass of primary source material that they spawned remain curiously underexplored as key moments of cultural and social history. Early modern sieges have mostly, if ever, been treated as singular terrifying events. This workshop seeks to understand early modern sieges in a comparative fashion. Individual contributions concentrate on primary sources, in which contemporaries attempted to describe and make sense of the traumatic military, political and social ordeals they encountered in siege warfare. Presenting work in progress at various stages, participants will offer a variety of examples as a basis for joint reflection and discussion. An overview and reflections on the problem of a definition of siege warfare for world history in the modern era will be presented by Professor Peter Wilson (University of Hull) in a public keynote lecture. All the contributions of this workshop offer glimpses into a 'world of the siege', a rich mosaic of different cultural perspectives on a gruesome, yet fascinating event of war.