Raconter la guerre Narrating War

One of the most significant aspects of recent historiographical work on war has been the attention paid to the cultural representations of conflict: the visual representation of war and its memory, language and rhetoric. This historiographical approach towards the subject of war has brought new attention to ways of representing war and the languages used to recount it. The First World War is usually seen as marking a new era; the unusual nature of the violence of this conflict, with the “disappearance of battle” and the mechanization of death, signalling the end of war as a place for generating men’s honour. But other moments in the history of western culture have seen the paradigm of war change in the accounts and narratives of contemporaries. Among these, the period of the Italian Wars of the sixteenth century, when the image of war transformed from a theatre of conflict between chivalric heroes to the anonymous encounters of armies