© 2017 Studies in Philology, Incorporated 517 Arms or the Man I: Gunpowder Technology and the Early Modern Romance 1 by Sheila J. Nayar This essay places the chivalric romance, both as a print and performance genre, “under the shadow” of Renaissance England’s contemporaneous gunpowder revolution. Only in exposing the sway of artillery on the long sixteenth century can we grasp how the romance was circumscribing, exorcising, and sometimes even wittingly censoring that technology’s presence. Authors who were penning, and tournament participants who were acting out, the romances—Philip Sidney among them—were defending a social terrain that gunpowder was rendering obsolete. By additionally placing the romances beside pamphlets written by actual soldiers—some who criticized Sidney outright—a more complicated and fretful picture emerges vis-à-vis the sixteenth-century nexus of literature, technology, and society. [S]ome of the inventions already known are such as before they were discovered it could hardly have entered any man’s head to think of; they would have been simply set aside as impossible. —Francis Bacon, The New Organon (1620) I begin not in the Renaissance but in the early 1980s—with a classic scene from the flm Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana Jones, adventurer- archaeologist, charges through the streets of Cairo, whip in hand and pursuing his paramour’s kidnapper, only to fnd his way ob- structed by a black-cloaked assassin wielding a glinting scimitar. The swordsman twirls his outsize weapon, faunting his cutthroat handi- 1  This article is the frst of a two-part study of gunpowder and literature in early mod- ern England. The second part is forthcoming in Studies in Philology 115.2 (Spring, 2018).