Renaissance military memoirs break many of the expectations present-day readers are likely to have of them. Instead of being stories, they are lists; instead of aiming to make us understand, they aim to make us remember; and instead of clearly distinguishing historical from autobiographical reality and history from lifestory, they efface these dichotomies, replacing them with the dichotomy memorable/unmemorable.

Consequently, what the individualistic Burckhardtian theory says of medieval people and texts may be applied with some alterations to Renaissance military memoirists and to their texts. Renaissance military memoirs are dominated by the collective identity of warrior noblemen, rather than by the personal identity of the memoirist. The lifestories of individual warrior noblemen were meaningful only in the context of noble history, and noble history in its turn was a sort of noble ‘class consciousness’, revolving around the lives of warrior noblemen. Recording honorable deeds, whether one's own or someone else's, was first and foremost a definition of who ‘we’ are. Like a Marxist proletarian, as long as a warrior noble- man thought about himself in terms of his own deeds alone, he was to some extent self-estranged. He could be fully conscious of himself as a nobleman only by having a much wider consciousness of ‘class’ history. Renaissance military memoirs were written out of such wide historical consciousness, which made no distinction between history and the lifestories of particular noblemen, and which viewed each noble lifestory as an affair of collective interest.