A List of Books Relating to the Peninsular War in Spain

by Gary Menchen ©2003-2023 by Gary Menchen, all rights reserved. Please click on the link to send comments, suggestions etc.

Introduction     Memoirs     General Histories     Studies     Fiction

This bibliography of books related to the Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal, 1808-1814, is based on citations I collected over a decade ago. I've done some cleanup, added some links that may be useful, and increased the total number of entries; there are nearly 500 different titles in 720 editions listed. There are over 200 books with links to their full text online.

The listings are divided into the four categories listed in the links above. This division is my subjective view of the individual books. Fiction (and poetry) is usually straightforward, but "Memoir", which I use in the sense of "first person", is not; here it includes whatever I think reports the personal experience of the author; in the nineteenth century memoir was often used for a mixture of reminiscences by other individuals along with perhaps letters and or journal entries by the subject. My goal for the Memoir category is for it to include books with significant first person content. The distinction between General History and Studies is imprecise.

Mostly books in English are included; there are some translations, primarily from the French. Arthur Conan Doyle thought that the best of the memoirs were written by the French and that Marbot's Adventures were "the first of all soldier books in the world".

Sources include book dealer catalogs (which shows how long ago this project was started), library catalogs, my own modest collections, and works cited by authors writing on the subject. One consequence of this approach is that I have not physically examined all of the entries. I will note as a warning that, for example, Charles Oman's book Wellington's Army contains what one would expect to be an authoritative listing of memoirs; on examination its clear that his citations are often to binding titles or his own abbreviated record of the book titles, and not exactly as they appear on the title pages.

For a beautiful specialized catalog of rare books see Maggs Brothers Peninsular War Catalogue 1443 online, and they have a variety of titles in current stock. Peter Harrington has (as of October 2023) some interesting and unusual Peninsular War items. The British publisher Ken Trotman" has a large list of Napoleonic War titles.

Whats New?

The Listings

Links that may be available include

Reprints from the various print-on-demand type publishers are generally not included.

Last Updated by Gary Menchen ©2003-2023 all rights reserved. Please click on the link to send comments, suggestions etc.

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