Rola kobiet we wczesnonowożytnej wojskowości: próba spojrzenia na przykładzie siedemnastowiecznej armii hiszpańskiej

Abstract

This article is devoted to the different roles played by women in the seventeenth-century Spanish army. As the issue of the presence of women in pre-industrial armies has not received much attention among researchers, the problem is still presented according to stereotypes shaped by nineteenth-century historiography and the early works of military historians. In their light, women in the armies of the early modern era assumed at best the role of servants, laundresses, cooks or offered sexual services. More recent works by historians of social military history, however, shed a completely different light on the issue, showing them not only as actively participating in army life, but also as taking up arms or seeking help for themselves and their soldiers’ orphans after the war. In this article, I will present the three roles of women that emerge from the sources – woman in armed combat, widow and mother – for the seventeenth-century Spanish army.