Anastasija Ropa and Timothy Dawson's The Horse in Premodern European Culture features fifteen essays that use specialist equine knowledge to improve medieval and early modern scholars’ engagement with horses and horsemanship. While several essays trickle into the sixteenth century, contributors primarily focus on the medieval period in Continental Europe (chiefly France and Germany) with England as the oft-cited exception.
The volume starts with working horses, war horses, and performing horses, challenging a tendency to highlight exclusively elite horses. Fabienne Meiers argues that the diversity of available horses was reflected in their price: inexpensive animals were the equivalent of a swineherd's salary over twenty-three days, while expensive animals were the equivalent of ninety days in Luxembourg. Medieval horse varieties included the palfrey (a gaited riding horse), destrier (war horse for armored combat), courser (war horse for mobile combat), and rouncy (riding horse) common across France, Germany, England, and even Wales (Edgar Rops); others—the Galloway and Norse horse (Miriam Bibby) or Iberian horses—complicate this general typology.
The contributors’ focus on materiality involves a creative array of sources. Some re-created tack. For example, Dawson's chapter on baggage animals centers on his development of a pack saddle suitable for a donkey, and Marina Viallon's analysis of a sixteenth-century war saddle rests on observations from her own reconstruction of the object. Others trace transformations in the construction of bits (John Clark) and harnesses (Gail Brownrigg), often through the mimetic interpretation of visual evidence drawn from medieval manuscripts and art objects, along with a smattering of material remains. In addition to this materialist methodology, the volume features two more literary approaches. Karen Campbell argues for the importance of reading horse behavior along with written equestrian sources and returns to questions of posthumanism; Bibby's analysis focuses on Le Roman Des Aventures De Fregus. Overall, the collection is particularly suited for scholars who want to understand which part of a saddle is a tree, the placement of a lance during jousting (Jürg Gassmann), the cavalry's use of crossbows (Jack Gassmann), and other details of horsemanship. More broadly, the volume's framing encourages historians to adopt an expansive approach to sources from the premodern world, including especially archaeological and genomic evidence in addition to canonical textual and visual sources.
In our mechanized and urbanized world, many scholars have defaulted to thinking through metaphors of horsepower and drawing analogies between steeds and more familiar machines, unintentionally occluding the health concerns, life cycles, and ephemeral value of living animals. Having a horse meant investing in its well-being, as Elina Cotterill suggests in her analysis of the English vernacular literature of hippiatric medicine. While contributors take seriously the work of horses in consuming energy and expending labor—take Floriana Bardoneschi's fruitful analysis of caloric intake and work output of horses and oxen and Katrin Boniface's attention to the nutritional content of breads as supplementary feed for horses—they resist the metaphoricalization of horses and avoid technological analogies drawn out of the Industrial Revolution. In Ropa's words, “a horse is not a product that can be manufactured with an eye toward certain parameters: many criteria influence the way the adult horse will come out, and not all of these criteria can be foreseen” (221). These animals’ value was contingent on their health, the status of their owners, color, care, and potential use.
Several contributors refute prominent narratives and provide surprising connections. Jürg Gassmann counters the widely held assertion that medieval cavalry primarily served a shock function by driving into static infantry formations; rather, he argues, they “rode up to, but not into” cohesive infantry formations (72). Brownrigg contends that the horse collar was not “a medieval intervention that revolutionized transport by replacing inefficient ancient harasses, which had choked the horses” (55). Jennifer Jobst deconstructs riding before a prince, from the manège movements to turnout, noting that the rider ought to trot toward the prince, halt, and bow in a practice still preserved in the modern dressage test. While one of the volume's strengths is its range of approaches, this is also a weakness; much of the most innovative research centers on material analysis alongside administrative documents, and this might have been highlighted as a central theme across all essays. In sum, contributors’ use of their archival, linguistic, material, and equestrian expertise provides a number of clear windows into premodern Europe's practical horsemanship across social strata.
