UC Berkeley

Precarious Lines: Violence, Masculinity, and Desire in 14th Century Visual Cultures of Gunpowder is the first art historical study of premodern gunpowder artillery and makes critical interventions in how we conceive of the role of art in socialising both state and interpersonal violence. Central to this study is an elaborately illuminated, early 14th century manuscript called The Milemete Treatise produced on the eve of Edward III’s coronation as king of England. I consider how shifts in imaging the technologies of violence impacted the cultural construction of gender and military pedagogies across this manuscript with specific attention to how the artist constructed a visual history of human violence ending in the gunpowder-laden future. Through recontextualizing the earliest surviving Western artworks depicting gunpowder artillery, this project considers the ramifications of how elite young men were encountering the material cultures, machines, and alchemy of war on the eve of immense military change. Re-situating the manuscript’s final quire of military drawings, I argue that artists were bridging the gap between the rising profession of engineers and the sovereigns who employed them to bring their armies up to date technologically. I argue that artworks produced in the context of military pedagogy invested in concepts of imperialism and utilised the power of images to compare the conquest of a woman’s body in rape to acts of conquest carried out by the English crown through leveraging military metaphors. My study nuances our understanding of medieval masculinity, chivalric sexuality, and patriarchal cultures of obfuscating consent. Precarious Lines evidences the foundational connection between militarised masculinity and misogyny in Western visual discourse.