Chapter 3 uses the letters of Gregorios Antiochos to explore the scholar’s body. Antiochos, who experienced chronic illness from a young age, combined his own bodily feeling with gender discourses to create a subversive image of the scholar which challenged ideals of military masculinity. He juxtaposed the strong body of the soldier, forged through physical exercise, to the frail body of the learned man hunched over his books, and declared his preference for the latter. He also expressed his own relationship with books and the furniture that facilitated his scholarly work, in disability terms: his cane, staff, armrest and guides. When at points the connection with scholarship was severed, Antiochos felt truly disabled. A body in crisis emerged that was assailed by unwanted becomings, prime among them the possibility of becoming-horse and losing his rationality. Despite this emphasis on reason, speech and self-determination, Antiochos’ letters present us with unexpected configurations of human and non-human bodies which blur the lines between organic and inorganic and help decentre man. In doing so, they posit the Eastern Roman scholar with his books and study furniture as a kind of antipode to the Western knight and his horse.

Chapter 2 brings to light a dozen desertion-themed plays and operas that followed in the wake of Le Siège de Calais. These works, which were performed during the Old Regime’s twilight, are analyzed alongside recent scholarship on military and early modern masculinities to tease out the theatricalization of an emerging martial culture that drew on emotional brotherhood and feminine exclusion. This chapter includes a comparative analysis of two versions of one play, Le Déserteur, a sentimental anti-war drame by Louis-Sébastien Mercier and an alternative version of the play that was dramaturgically “militarized” by Joseph Patrat for soldiers and sailors at the navy’s theater in Brest (Le Théâtre de la Marine). A close reading of variants, edits, and both textual and cultural manipulation presents war drama as a site of conflict in a larger intellectual battle where different factions in French society argued about reform cultures inside military and theatrical circles.