Gregory Hanlon

Gregory Hanlon (born August 29, 1953), is a Canadian behavioural and military historian of early modern Europe.

Biography

Hanlon was educated in France at the Université de Bordeaux, and since 1989 he has taught at Dalhousie University with teaching stints at the University of California Berkeley, Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne and the Université Laval (Québec).

Academic work

Confessions & Community was the first to explore in detail the problem of confessional coexistence during the age of the European wars of religion. According to Hanlon, widespread religious toleration was a pragmatic negotiation among neighbours, completely unaffected by philosophical ideas.

In the Twilight of a Military Tradition, Hanlon revealed the surprising extent of Italian aristocratic participation in European wars, from Flanders and Hungary to Turkey and the Barbary Coast. These elites then demilitarized rapidly under the weight of the economic crisis caused by the Thirty Years' War, and as the small states became militarily irrelevant, nobles moved instead into the service of the Church.

In Human Nature in Rural Tuscany and in several spinoff articles, Hanlon demonstrated that European populations almost certainly practiced neonatal infanticide on a large scale throughout the early modern period, at the expense of girls, but also boys when the uncertainty of survival and the cost of bringing them up outweighed the benefits for their married parents.

In recent years, Hanlon has studied the place of the Thirty Years' War in Italy. The Hero of Italy examines the illuminating experience of the young Duke of Parma, who embraced the French alliance against Spain only to suffer humiliating defeat. The subsequent book, Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies is one of the most closely researched and detailed books on the operation of early modern armies, explicitly inspired by neo-darwinian thinking, wherein human beings are evolved animals equipped with a wide variety of innate predispositions. Hanlon’s next book, "European Military Rivalry 1500-1750: Fierce Pageant", published by Routledge in April 2020, consists of an overview of European conflict in roughly chronological order, with chapters on the underlying structures permitting warfare on an ever larger scale, and several chapters describing the details of operational campaigning, siege warfare and the battlefield experience. His most recent book, "Death Control in the West 1500-1800" examines neo-natal infanticide by married parents in Italy, France and England.

Distinctions

1992: Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History