Attending to Early Modern Gun Violence

This presentation will focus on Jacques Callot’s series of prints, Les Grandes Misères de la guerre, which he produced in response to the Thirty Years’ War. This series contains some of the most graphic images of gun violence produced in early modern Europe. This presentation will focus on the agency of guns in this print series and will combine visual analysis and primary source research with a brief account of how we used these prints in the classroom. Callot had a knack for transforming moments of everyday life into the stuff of visual epic, but this generally been appreciated by looking at his images of pageantry. This presentation focuses on what can be learned (about history and humanity) when we attend instead to his depictions of gun violence.