The presence of arms within the Renaissance domestic interior is often overlooked, in part because it fails to match our modern conception of what is domestic'. Parisian inventories from the first half of the 16th century describe arms in most households, demonstrating that these objects were a constant presence in domestic space, and played an important social role in the culture of the time. Their daily use for self-defence, or simply by the common soldiery, reminds us of a society where the code of honour of the nobility was often reduced to the need to survive, where the sword was the...