Getting Your Head Around the Journal of Medieval Military History
If you are doing serious work in medieval military history, you will inevitably bump into this publication. It is not a standard journal with monthly issues. It is a book series, published by Routledge, that releases volumes containing collected essays and standalone studies. The distinction matters more than it sounds, because it changes how you reference it, find it, and use it in your own research. The series was founded by Bernard Hamilton and Christine Whyatt, with contributions from scholars like Christopher Allmand and George Garnett. It covers the period from roughly the fifth to the fifteenth century across Europe and the broader Mediterranean. What makes it useful is the cross-disciplinary approach. You will find contributions on logistics, siegecraft, military organization, and material culture alongside traditional narrative history. Most academics I know treat it as a supplementary source rather than a primary one. That is fair. The essays are thorough, but they often assume you already have a working knowledge of the basics. If you are starting out, you will spend more time cross-referencing than you should.
Accessing the Material
The series is available through several channels, and knowing which one to use saves you considerable time and money. Routledge hosts it on their platform, and individual volumes can be purchased separately. A single volume in hardback runs roughly eighty to one hundred and twenty pounds depending on the year and page count. Library subscriptions through institutional access are the standard route for most researchers. I run into this problem regularly: someone asks me how to find a specific essay from volume seven without subscribing to the whole series. The answer is usually JSTOR or Project MUSE, which sometimes carry individual articles. Check there first before spending money on a physical copy. I once tracked down a citation about Genoese crossbowmen in the Battle of Crécy by accessing the volume through my university library, then downloading just the relevant chapter as a PDF. Took about ten minutes instead of waiting three weeks for interlibrary loan.
How the Series Actually Works
Each volume has a theme. Volume one focused on medieval knighthood and chivalry. Volume four examined logistics and supply in medieval warfare. Volume nine looked at military order. The thematic structure means some volumes are more relevant to your work than others, and that is worth checking before you cite anything. A 2018 volume on "Warfare and Military Organisation in the Central Middle Ages" contains essays on French and English feudal levies that will save you a lot of time if your research touches on that area. Here is something people often miss: the series does not publish peer-reviewed journal articles in the traditional sense. Each volume goes through editorial review, but the selection process is different from what you find in a standard journal like Speculum or English Historical Review. The editors commission contributors rather than opening the floor to submissions. This means the quality is generally high, but you will not find the same diversity of voice that comes from open calls.
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Common Pitfalls
The first mistake I see repeatedly is citing the series as if it were a journal with continuous pagination. It is not. Each volume starts fresh with its own pagination. If you write "Journal of Medieval Military History, pp. 45–67," a reviewer will spot that immediately. Always include the volume number and the specific page range for the chapter you are citing. The second issue is overestimating how much primary source material appears in these volumes. The series is scholarly interpretation, not source translation. If you need the actual chronicle or letter, look for the footnotes in the essay and track down the original. I spent an afternoon once trying to verify a claim about Castilian cavalry tactics that a contributor attributed to a thirteenth-century source. The footnote pointed to a nineteenth-century edition. I found the passage in the actual manuscript at the Archivo de la Real Chancillería in Valladolid. The scholar had paraphrased it loosely. Not wrong, but not precise either.
What to Read First
If you have a limited budget, start with volume two, which covers military service in the Middle Ages. It has essays on mercenary contracts, feudal obligations, and the economics of warfare that are surprisingly accessible even for graduate students. Volume six on "The Medieval Warfare Experience" is also strong, particularly the chapter by Richard Mortimer on the psychology of siege warfare. For anyone working on the Crusades, volume three remains essential, though some of the arguments have been contested since publication. The essays by Jonathan Riley-Smith and Benjamin Kedar are foundational, but later scholarship has refined several of their conclusions. Read them, but read the critiques too.
The Gaps
The series has notable blind spots. It covers Western Europe extensively, with some attention to Byzantium and the Islamic world, but sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia are almost entirely absent. If your research touches on Mongol military systems or Swahili coast warfare, this is not going to help you. You would be better served looking at the Journal of Global History or the Journal of World History instead. Another limitation is the Eurocentric framing of "medieval." The chronological scope assumes a European periodization that does not map neatly onto other regions. Several contributors have noted this in later volumes, but it remains a structural issue with the series as a whole. The publishing schedule is also slow. Volumes come out irregularly, sometimes two years apart. If you are working on a tight deadline and need recent scholarship, you might find yourself waiting for material that is already outdated by the time it appears. That is just how book-series journals work, and it is something to factor into your planning.
