In Part I we saw that there is no ground to think that Renaissance military memoirs are about the self or that they recognize the history/lifestory dichotomy. Part II attempts to take a fresh look at Renaissance military memoirs. It examines what kind of historical reality these texts describe and create, what things this reality is made of, and what things this reality excludes.

In mapping the historical reality of Renaissance military memoirs I rely heavily on comparing these texts with twentieth-century military memoirs, particularly junior-ranks memoirs. As noted earlier, the purpose of this comparison is first to gauge the expectations of present-day readers, and second, to highlight the unique characteristics of the Renaissance texts. For the reality created by the Renaissance texts seems self-evident and natural at first sight. Only the comparison with the alternative reality of twentieth-century memoirs shows that this reality is heavily biased and has far-reaching cultural and political implications.

In exploring the textual reality presented in Renaissance military memoirs I refer at times to the contextual reality, but my focus is on reality as it appears in the texts. I leave aside the thorny question of whether the texts are a ‘transparent’ representation of the way memoirists actually saw reality, or whether they are an intentional creation of the way memoirists wanted to see reality. Trying to determine which of the two is the correct option is a rather barren exercise, especially since people always tend to view their ‘truth’ as transparent, whereas every such ‘truth’ can always be reconstructed as an artificial creation.