Introduction

Abstract

When Shakespeare’s Richard III wanders the field at Bosworth crying, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!,”¹ his position on foot presages the failure of his campaign to save his kingdom from Richmond’s efforts to end the division between the houses of York and Lancaster, and it represents just punishment for his illicit machinations and murders. Indeed, Richard’s horselessness signals his profound unfitness for rule—hunched of back and afoot, he is made common, literally pedestrian, worthy of nothing better than a traitor’s death. Richard’s words have become a familiar and now nearly comic example of the importance of practical things to great enterprises: kingdoms, empires—whole worlds, both material and immaterial— were built on the backs of horses. But scholars as a rule must approach early modern culture with only a limited, usually secondhand understanding of the horse’s role in defining and delimiting that culture. Thus they are, not entirely unlike the pedestrian Richard, trying to succeed while lacking a basic and profoundly necessary tool. This volume reintroduces scholars, in depth and on many fronts, to the significance of the horse in creating the early modern world we now study.