<p>Discipline has been an important concept in the history of early modern Europe, including the training of soldiers. This concept has often been associated with the works of Foucault. In contrast to Foucault’s own periodization, the first European drill manuals, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, are often cited as a beginning of modern military techniques and modern social disciplining. Insofar as these techniques rendered ordinary soldiers docile, they supposedly contributed to the development of the modern nation-state and its monopoly on legitimate force. Since the introduction of discipline as an object of historical study, it has been made more complex: historiography from below has been exploring the ways in which ordinary people have not merely been objects of discipline, but have actively navigated their own lives. Moreover, the early modern period was catastrophically violent: if Foucault defined discipline as “the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political’ force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force,” not only the bodies of common soldiers but even more the bodies of elite males were not reduced as political forces in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. These investigations may not have made it to critical theory. This article attempts to bridge this gap through a close reading of multiple sixteenth and seventeenth century drill manuals not only within the context of other “fight books” such as fencing manuals, but also as examples of the early modern new sciences. It argues that the individual motions of these manuals were not designed to produce factory-like automata, but were instead one example of a more general early modern disassembly of nature. While Foucault’s earlier writings on discipline portray it as repressive, his later writings can be used fruitfully to uncover the self-directed potential of early modern martial practice. This article attempts to render more complex the historian’s use of the concept of discipline and the theorist’s use of early modern warfare and violent practice. Far from making men docile, I argue that sixteenth and seventeenth century personal techniques of martial discipline could also be used for disruptive ends.</p>