History Book Club October 2026 | Warfare in the Global Middle Ages
What is the History Book Club?
The History Book Club is a monthly event series that brings together alumni, faculty, students, and friends of the History Department to engage virtually with our faculty and graduates, and learn about their recently published books.
Do I need to read the book to attend this gathering?
You do not! Our History Book Club gatherings are designed to be enjoyed by any history-lover, whether or not you’ve read the featured book.
About the book
Warfare in the Global Middle Ages
(Routlage, May 2026)
War, preparation for war, and dealing with war’s aftermath consumed the greater part of the surplus resources of societies around the globe throughout the pre-modern period. Military matters affected men, women, and children alike, as direct participants in organized violence, as the victims of conflicts, or through broad-based impositions on ostensibly civilian populations in cash, kind, and labor. Warfare in the Global Middle Ages illuminates the organization and conduct of war as well as the impact of warfare on societies in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas across a long millennium spanning from the third century CE to the sixteenth century CE.
The volume is organized in eight chapters, which address the current state of scholarship regarding warfare over this long period, the source materials available to scholars to investigate the myriad questions related to this broad field, and the institutions developed by societies to defend themselves and engage in wars of conquest, military technology, the logistics of war, the education and training of military leaders and individual combatants, as well as strategy, military intelligence, and diplomacy. The authors argue that an analysis of these topics illuminates broad similarities among polities across the globe, the transmission of ideas and technologies on a regional and global level, and also important differences in the ways that societies responded to similar challenges.
This work is intended broadly both for specialists in the history of warfare across the globe, for an interested lay public, as well as for use in the classroom.
About the Hosts
David S. Bachrach is a professor of medieval European history at the University of New Hampshire, USA. His research focuses on the administrative and military history of the Carolingian Empire, the early medieval kingdom of Germany, as well as the kingdom of England in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. His recent publications include Foundations of Royal Power in Early Medieval Germany (2022); Bruno of Merseburg’s Saxon War: Translation and Commentary (2022) and Warfare in Medieval Europe c. 400-c.1453, 2nd edition (2021), both with Bernard S. Bachrach; and Administration and Organization of War in Thirteenth-Century England (2020).
Christopher Flynn (UMN PhD 2020) is a historian of the Middle Ages and was advised by the late Bernard (Bernie) Bachrach. Flynn has taught history at the University of Mankato, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Gustavus Adolphus College.
Join us for our next History Book Club event
November 4 - Jess Arnett (PhD ‘18), assistant professor of Comparative American Studies and Environmental Studies at Oberlin College and author of Settler Imperialism: Alaska Natives and the Myth of the Last Frontier (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) in conversation with Jean O’Brien, Regents professor of history at the University of Minnesota.