Aidyn P. M. Osgood

My dissertation, prospectively titled “The Role of Armies in the Sexual Imaginary of France and the Holy Roman Empire, 1550-1650” promises a reflection on how the history of sexuality and military history can be brought into productive tension to revise dominant narratives in both fields. As several gender historians have demonstrated in recent decades, the Reformation transformed the gender and sexual ideology of early modern Europe in both Catholic and Protestant polities. Most importantly, the Reformation’s institutionalization corresponded with a strengthening of patriarchal authority and a reformulation of masculinity as oriented towards the fathers of households. How the Reformation played out in the highly-gendered communities that were early modern militaries has only recently garnered critical attention. Most military historians on the topic have argued that the Reformation was less consequential than the development of new technologies and the capacity of states regularly to supply their soldiers. My research revisits this argument by examining how sexuality figured in depictions of army life in France and the Holy Roman Empire – two polities that were wracked by religious civil wars that produced a wide and rich range of sexualized depictions of army life. In turning towards documents typically treated by military historians – including but not limited to military treatises, visual art, memoirs, journals, chronicles, and military law codes – my work will expand the archive available to historians of sexuality while reassessing the role of armies as a vehicle through which contemporaries thought sexual violence and sexual pleasure together, not as opposed concepts, but as concepts inherent in and constitutive of each other.

Fields of Study

• Early Modern Europe 
• Gender History
• History of Sexuality
• Military History