Download PDF | (History of Warfare 112) Daniel Jaquet, Karin Verelst, Timothy Dawson - Late Medieval and Early Modern Fight Books_ Transmission and Tradition of Martial Arts in Europe (14th-17th Centuries)-Brill 2016.
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List of Contributors (in order of appearance) Timothy Dawson Being drawn into the dawn of historical re-enactment in Australia in the late nineteen seventies from prior participation in modern fencing, Timothy Dawson presumed that medieval combat could not have been an unstructured affair. Initially reverse engineering sword technique from sabre, and spear from foil, he soon moved on to considering what could be inferred from historical art sources, rapidly finding an array of functional techniques. From being the primary trainer in the re-enactment group the New Varangian Guard in Melbourne, Timothy set up his first dedicated HEMA school, called Amyna (Greek for Defence), in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains East of Sydney, in 1984.
Since then he has continued his research and teaching in various locations in Australia and Europe. Timothy has an Honours degree and PhD in Classical Studies and has published frequently on aspects of material culture and daily life in the Middle Ages. Matthias Johannes Bauer M.A. MBA, lecturer for medieval studies and Higher Educational and Research Manager. He specializes on editing vernacular texts, such as Fight Books, chronicles, and codes of law. Rachel E. Kellet specializes in depictions of combat in Middle High German literature and the early German Fight Books. Her doctoral thesis (King’s College, London) was published in 2008, and she is currently an independent researcher. Her recent and forthcoming publications focus on Royal Armouries MS I.33 and the work of Sigmund Ringeck, as well as on medieval literary works. Jens Peter Kleinau is an independent researcher and prominent blogger. His work focuses on the pragmatic literature in high medieval and renaissance manuscripts on military and martial arts. Karin Verelst is a researcher and lecturer in history and philosophy of science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Her research focuses on the period between the fifteenth and the seventeenth century, with a particular interest in the interrelation between the cultural and scientific changes over that period. Her interest in Historical European Martial Arts stems originally from her intense practice of this fascinating discipline, but the evident relevance of this new field for her academic interests encouraged her to devote a substantial part of her research to contributing to the disclosure of this incredibly rich new sources for the study of European history. John Clements is a recognized international expert and foremost instructor of Medieval and Renaissance fighting arts. As pioneering researcher, he has pursued the subject since 1980 and taught in 17 countries. His writings have been featured world wide and he has appeared in numerous television programs. He works professionally on the subject and consults for the entertainment industry. Daniel Jaquet is senior Teaching and Research assistant at the University of Geneva, Department of History.
His dissertation is entitled “Fighting in armour in the light of the Fight Books (late 14.–early 16)”. He is specialised in HEMA studies and is co-editor of the Journal Acta Periodica Duellatorum. He has written or edited several publications in the field, lately L’art chevaleresque du combat and Expérimenter le maniement des armes à la fin du Moyen Âge. Dierk Hagedorn is senior instructor for the long sword at Hammaborg—Historischer Schwertkampf, Hamburg, Germany and works as a web developer and graphic designer. He specializes in the German mediaeval fechtbücher and has published several editions, e.g. about the Peter von Danzig manuscript, the Gladiatoria codex from New Haven and Hans Talhoffer. Ken Mondschein PhD, Maître d’Armes Historique, earned his doctorate from Fordham University and was a Research Fellow at the Higgins Armory Museum. He teaches history and fencing at several institutions in Massachusetts, and is actively looking for a full-time academic position. His publications include a translation of Camillo Agrippa’s Trattato di Scienza d’Arme and The Knightly Art of Battle, on the Getty example of the Fior di Battaglia.
Manuel Valle Ortiz is an independent researcher from Santiago de Compostela. He specialises in Destreza bibliography and his recent publications include Nueva bibliografía de la antígua Esgrima y Destreza de las Armas, Modo fácil y nuevo de Luis Pacheco de Narváez (critical ed.), Principios de Miguel Pérez de Mendoza (critical ed.), Las cien conclusiones de Luis Pacheco de Narváez (critical ed.), Tratado das lições da Espada preta de Thomas Luis (critical ed.). Olivier Dupuis is an independent researcher. He specializes in the history of fencing and socialization of fencing masters. Reinier van Noort is an instructor and researcher focussing on rapier fencing according to Bruchius, and other 17th century self-defence arts practiced in the Low Countries. Bert Gevaert (Ph.D. Classical Philology) is member of the Order of Saint Michael in Bruges and mainly studies longsword fencing according to the writings of 16th century masters.
Paul Wagner is an instructor with the Stoccata School of Defence in Sydney, Australia. He specialises primarily in British weapon systems, including Silver’s backsword, English quarterstaff, English longsword, English rapier, Highland Broadsword and Scottish Smallsword. He published several books and papers related to HEMA studies, including: Master of Defence: The Works of George Silver (2003); Medieval Sword and Shield according to I.33 (2003) and “Hawks, Rabbits and Tumbling Cats: An Analysis of English Longsword Terminology” (2010). Eric Burkart (M.A.) is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in medieval history at the University of Trier. From 2013 to 2015 he has also been research assistant in a DFG-financed project on ritualized combat in the Middle Ages (“Der mittelalterliche Zweikampf als agonale Praktik zwischen Recht, Ritual und Leibesübung”) at Technische Universität Dresden. In July 2015 he defended his PhD thesis on crusading discourses in late medieval Burgundy at Goethe-University Frankfurt. He specialises in cultural history, symbolic communication and propaganda in 15th century Burgundy and European martial arts traditions. Franck Cinato (PhD. EPHE—École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, Sorbonne), researcher at CNRS (in HTL Laboratory, Histoire des Théories Linguistiques / History of Linguistic Theories), works mainly on Early Middle Ages Manuscripts, with a particular interest in transmission and receipt of glossaries and grammatical texts in the Carolingian period, especially those concerning the Liber glossarum and the grammarian Priscian. B. Ann Tlusty is Professor of History and Associate Dean of Faculty at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, USA. She specializes in gendered behaviors in Early Modern Germany and her publications include The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany: Civic Duty and the Right of Arms (2011) and Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany (2001).
Marco Cavina is a full professor (professore ordinario) of the history of medieval and modern law in the faculty of law at the University of Bologna. First and foremost he is interested in the history of domestic powers and institutions (paternal authority, marital coercion, adoption), and in the history of criminal justice and duels. He’s author of several books and essays in Italy and abroad. He’s director of the “History of Criminal Justice. Centre of study and research” (University of Bologna). Prof. Marco Cavina, fully-qualified Professor of medieval and modern History of Law.
Foreword
Sydney Anglo Fechtbücher—as will be readily apparent from the wide-ranging essays in this volume—are a good deal more than what the generic term seems to imply. They are not invariably books dealing exclusively with fencing—although they often are. They are manuals professing to teach, describe, or sometimes merely to display, various forms of personal combat. Thus they might deal with fighting on foot with swords, daggers, axes or other weapons; they might describe the techniques of unarmed combat or wrestling; they might discuss fighting on horseback with swords or lances. Or they might deal with several or even, occasionally, all of these skills: and in this respect the most striking example of the genre is the Emperor Maximilan I’s manuscript, Freydal, which has never even been considered as a Fechtbuch by those few specialists who have written about such things. It is always categorised as a Turnierbuch, but it certainly does show every type of combat, on foot or on horse, in which Maximilian is supposed to have participated.
The 255 surviving illustrations are grouped in sequences of three (a joust in the open field, a tilt, and a foot combat) and each group ends with a fourth depicting a dance or masque at court. This prominence given to dances and masques within a combative context is important—echt Fechtbuch or not—and it is worth bearing in mind when considering the Fechtbucher in general. The term has been most commonly applied to the German combat manuals (both in manuscript and in print) which proliferated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But to adopt so narrow a definition is not helpful because, in the first place, these manuals were a European phenomenon and comprise works not only in German but also in Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, English, and Swedish. Secondly, although the majority appear to be didactic in purpose, they were sometimes conceived more as a record of different types of combat than as instruction in any one of them. And thirdly, they have continued to flourish, in one form or another, up to the present day.
A few of the Fight Books have no written commentary: but the great majority of them combine text and pictures, and they constitute probably the longest series of secular, figurative, illustrated manuals now available to us. Yet they have received scarcely any attention either from art historians or from historians of ideas. And this is a great mistake because it is too vast a corpus of material to ignore, especially since it offers rich scope for a very wide range of scholars: those, for example, who are interested in attempts to depict movement; or in the ways whereby movement may be analysed and even choreographed; or in the evolution of diagrammatic notation and especially its relationship to the history of dancing; or in the application of mathematics and engineering principles to elucidate complex human activity; or in the history of costume; or in Renaissance epistemological debates about the relationship between theory and practice; or in the methods by which well-known (but still obscure) humanist ideas about physical training were actually taught and by whom; and finally—because many of these texts are in verse and are sometimes accompanied by gnomic emblematic devices—there is even something for the historian of mnemonic systems and codes.
This is the potential harvest which could be gathered from the Fechtbücher: and one can only wonder at scholarly indifference of those who, no doubt, consider themselves to be serious cultural historians. I do not know why this has been so. Perhaps it is simply because the material systematises personal violence. Whatever the reason, I do sense a certain academic squeamishness at work here. I also sense something similar in the writings of humanist educationalists in the Renaissance itself, despite the fact that they professed themselves to be concerned with the civic benefits to be derived from physical education and military training. This much has been widely known since William Woodward discussed the matter at the end of the nineteenth century. But we do not know a great deal more. Vergerio devoted some space to bodily exercise and especially to training in the art of war for, just as the Romans had insisted on “systematic and scientific training in arms”, so, too, should contemporary youth “learn the art of the sword, the cut, the thrust and the parry; the use of shield, of the spear, of the club, training either hand to wield the weapon”. The notion that skill in arms was conducive to good citizenship derived ultimately from Vegetius’s De re militari and it became a pedagogic commonplace.
One author after another dutifully declared the social and political importance of such training; and the idea was reiterated through the sixteenth century and long after. However, humanist educationalists did not explain how instruction in the handling of weapons should be given and by whom. The problem had evidently occurred to Vergerio who came up with a typically donnish evasion. He refers to Publius Rutilius who, according to Valerius Maximus, had been the first person to institute regular lessons for the Roman soldiery on the handling of arms by calling together the “Teachers of the Gladiators” to demonstrate “the way of shunning and giving blows, according to the reasons of Art”. Vergerio approved the story but did not explain how those who had instructed Roman gladiators were going to apply their skills in a fifteenth-century school for young boys. An obvious solution would have been to recruit the services of the men who operated fencing schools—that is the masters of arms. Indeed, this may have been what happened; but we know nothing about how this might have been arranged or administered.
None the less, thanks to the Fechtbücher, we do know a good deal about the techniques which could have been taught. In fact we know that this pragmatic approach was suggested in the 1570s by Sir Humphrey Gilbert who hoped that an academy might be established in London for the education “of her Majesties Wardes and others the youth of nobility and gentlemen”. His scheme made provision that physical training should be fully catered for—with a riding master, a soldier to teach military science, and a “Master of Defence, who shalbe principally expert in the Rapier and dagger, the Sworde and terget, the grype of the dagger, the battaile axe and the pike, and shall theare publiquely teach”. This teacher would, presumably, have been one of the “Masters of Defence of London” which, while never formally incorporated as a guild, certainly acted like one. However, Gilbert’s idea never came to fruition and in 1581 we still find a stereotyped discussion of physical exercise provided by the English pedagogue Richard Mulcaster who recommended fencing as practised, inevitably, by the ancients: for it is beneficial, “both for the health of our bodies, and the helpe of our countries”.
Mulcaster even devotes a chapter to the “training master”, but merely argues that, since soul and body are inseparable, the trainer of the one should also be the trainer of the other. Yet where would one have found a ready supply of such universally-gifted men? There was, in fact, a serious mismatch between, on the one hand, educational theorists and, on the other, the masters of arms who were, initially, of low social status and whose schools were commonly regarded as a breeding ground of immorality and civil disorder—encouraging “Bruisers and misdoers walking by night”. Initially, it would not have been easy for academe to harness the skills of professional fighting masters: but the situation slowly changed— especially with the increasing tendency from the fifteenth century for the masters to band themselves together in guilds and even, in varying degrees, to receive official recognition—and eventually we find the martial arts being seriously taught in universities. Long before this time, however, the masters of arms had started to write books of their own and, although benefitting the common weal was not normally their principal purpose, they did make a reality (of sorts) out of the idealised union of arms and letters about which so many humanists liked to prattle.
Most masters of arms—with a few eccentric and unconvincing exceptions—recognised that it was well-nigh impossible to teach practical physical skills such as fencing, wrestling, and mounted combat, by books alone. Yet an increasing number still felt the urge to clarify their teaching by means of written manuals because, as Fiore de’ Liberi asserted at the beginning of the fifteenth century, combat techniques, “without books and writing can only be badly retained in the mind”. And he added that “there will never be a good scholar without books”. Two hundred years later (in 1606) Salvator Fabris told his readers not to marvel that a man of the sword should presume to write a book, or that the “practical knowledge of the sword” should be reduced to rules and precepts for, just as the learned have transferred their theoretical arts into practice, so the professor of arms converts his practice into a vera theorica. Eight years further on, George Hale challenged his unlettered English colleagues by asserting that “The Science of Defence, not unworthily stiled Noble . . . was never before in any Language brought to any Method”.
This was quite untrue, and Hale would surely have known it to be so, but his principal point was that the Professors of fencing in England were “so ignorant, that they could rather doe, than make demonstration, or reduce their doing to any certainty of principle”. We have here (strange as it may seem) stumbled into a byeway of some of the most intense epistemological conflicts of the Renaissance—Theory versus Practice. It was a secular counterpart to the theological conflict between Geneva and Basel. To what extent should activities such as fencing and wrestling be based upon general principles, or how far should their general principles derive from an observation of the activities? Should precepts be laid down by established authority or should they be based upon the empirical experience of practitioners? The masters of arms had, perforce, to combine both roles; and their attitude was well-expressed in 1676 by Jean-Baptiste Le Perche who still felt, like Fiore, that “in all those arts where one has need to use the hand, it is not enough to have knowledge of the principles, it is also necessary to join with it a long experience”; and he argued that, without the help of an excellent master, pupils could not learn how to use weapons simply by reading a book—not even his own which was, he declared significantly, written only “to aid the memory and ease the master’s burden”. The attitude of those masters who took pains to write about their art was distilled into a punning aphorism by Morsicato Pallavicini who wrote in 1670, Chi non legge non può dar legge. By his time the masters had, for several centuries, felt the need to set forth their own systems (or the systems they had adapted from other masters) as an aid to, or record of, the ways in which the martial arts could be both understood and practised. The methods employed by these masters were all basically similar: that is the provision of pictorial representations of movement often arranged into sequences, and usually with some verbal description. The combination of the two elements was intended to maximize the information conveyed to readers and to ensure (as far as possible) clarity of exposition. Initially the illustrations were wholly representational and depicted combatants in various isolated postures and were usually accompanied by very brief texts, often in verse. From the late thirteenth century onwards, several masters tried to perpetuate their skills by using pictures and words as in the well-known sword and buckler manuscript now preserved in the Royal Armouries. More famous still is the work of Fiore dei Liberi da Premariacco, whose treatise survives in a number of variant versions, all well illustrated and arranged in short logical sequences glossed with brief descriptive comments—a method not improved upon until well into the sixteenth century. By defining, depicting, and naming individual strokes and postures these early masters provided a visual and verbal vocabulary which could then be used as a shorthand to permutate and summarize a whole complex of linked movements. Subsequently there also developed more sophisticated techniques seeking to notate sequences of movement rather than simply to depict isolated postures. In 1553, for example, a much wider range of possibilities was opened up when Camillo Agrippa—who was not a fencing master, but a mathematician, architect and engineer—experimented with ways to enhance the usefulness of purely figurative representation. One was to suggest the unfolding of a single movement by using composite images, augmented by a simple system identifying the basic fencing positions by letter, which made it far easier to relate words and pictures precisely. However, it was not until 1600 that a truly diagrammatic approach to fencing movements was developed by the Spanish master Luys Pacheco de Narvaez who was obsessed with mathematics. Throughout his life he produced treatises filled with geometrical and philosophical speculation on movement notation illustrated with diagrams enhanced with directional lines, key letters, and labels to help relate them to a full textual description of what is supposed to be happening. All this would enable the reader “to teach himself, and learn without the necessity of a master to direct him”. Narvaez was an optimist but hardly realistic. For more than a century geometry absorbed the attention of Spanish masters who saw fencing as a rational sequence of movements which were susceptible to analysis and to diagrammatic representation. They believed that it was possible to notate the intricacies of sword combat in the same way that one could notate music. Combat was, unfortunately, not a dance although the Spanish tradition led to the work of Girard Thibault, a Dutch fencing master who had served his apprenticeship in Madrid and whose Académie de l’espée (published posthumously in 1630) took movement notation to a remarkable level of complexity and sophistication. Its forty-six illustrations, showing multiple postures enhanced by geometrical demonstrations of foot and sword movements, are of an unprecedented exactitude. They indicate several things simultaneously, in different ways, and even in different planes and, as Thibault himself tells us, they are pedagogical in purpose, not fantasy. Whatever the illustrative system adopted, the masters were always trying to clarify movement and, to achieve this end, they had to rely upon artists and we may infer a close working relationship from overwhelming circumstantial evidence. It is not merely that a majority of Fight Books include figures, and that some masters specifically acknowledged their utility. What we must realise is that illustrations were far more than an adornment to, or even a clarification of, the written texts. They were frequently obliged to carry the main burden of exposition and it would be no exaggeration to say that, often, without the pictures there would be no manual at all. Among many examples demonstrating the partnership between fighting master and artist is the wrestling treatise of Nicolaes Petter. Petter’s intention to compile his manual must have been carefully planned because he engaged the services of Romayn de Hooghe who actually visited the school where the master was teaching, to make drawings of a wide variety of wrestling postures which he ultimately turned into etchings. Petter died before the work could be completed although—according to the anonymous Preface—it had already been provided with its explanatory text. In any case, the book was published, translated, and republished with De Hooghe’s energetic and accurate illustrations bearing witness to what must have been a close, but by no means unusual, collaboration between the author and his artist. Of course, a fundamental question still remains. Was the theoretical elaboration which so many masters adopted really necessary for the practice of combat? Or was it mere window-dressing by educated and sophisticated authors such as Agrippa, Narvaez, and Thibault to give their work the intellectual status which perhaps they felt it lacked? Whatever the answer to that particular conundrum, the fact remains that the careful combination of illustrations and written words, the attempts to synthesize these into a system, and then to show how the system could be applied in action constitute an almost perfect conceptual framework—image, word, orientation, and action— a sequence which should be familiar to many students of intellectual history. It is a paradigm of the Warburg Institute Library in London; and those “Bruisers and misdoers walking by night” really should be allowed through the grand portals of Cultural History and granted the space and attention they deserve.
Introduction Karin Verelst, in collaboration with Timothy Dawson and Daniel Jaquet 1 A Forgotten Aspect of European History Restored The history of European warfare has been and continues to be the subject of a vivid scholarly attention. Studies of history of medieval and Renaissance warfare focus on large scale military practices, on technological developments, and on military biographies. Studies on chivalry offer in depth analyses of codes of conduct and social status of the chivalric institution, or of its role in literary imagination. What seems to be missing, however, is the systematic treatment of the specific skills or competences required of the individual combatant.1 A remarkable corpus of source-texts concerning this topic does exist, however, and has gained growing scholarly interest over the past decades. Nevertheless, the feeling remains that this extremely rich and in many ways surprising corpus deserves to become the focus of much more academic attention. By presenting a compendium of papers dealing with a wide variety of topics related to the corpus and relevant to the historian, the editors of the present volume hope to contribute to this desired increase in visibility. In this sense the book is an outgrowth of a two panels held at the International Medieval Congress held at Leeds, in 2012, where the corpus of European Fight Books was presented to a wider academic audience. With this volume, our basic aim is thus to bring state of the art research with respect to this extremely rich and in many aspects stunning literature in a handsome format to a wider academic readership, in the hope and expectation that Historical European Martial Arts Studies will inform new research, e.g., within the domains of history, cultural studies, sociology and literature, as well as in many other domains. The corpus deals with what the medieval sources call the “Art of Fighting”, the ars dimicatoria or Kunst des Fechtens, in the sense of an individual competence, not in the sense of a large scale tactical or strategic quality. A later development in the literature stresses the prestigious social stratum in which this art was supposed to be practiced in the past by referring explicitly to its knightly connotation: the Ritterliche kunst des Fechtens.2 References to its alte (of old) origin testify for this desire to connect to a distant and presumably glorious past.3 These references evidently point in the direction of sociologically relevant changes in the social strata concerned with either the practice, or the intellectual interest in these disciplines.4 One of the intriguing aspects of the study of this corpus is precisely the new light it sheds on those socio-cultural evolutions known to have taken place but not always as clearly mapped out as one would wish.5 The material is present in dozens, or even, depending on the criteria, up to hundreds of manuscripts, incunabula and printed works stemming from in origin mainly German and Italian traditions and schools, as far as present knowledge goes at least from the 14th century onwards.6 The specific corpus of literature discussed in this volume will be referred to as “Fight Books”. We prefer this term, widely used in either its English, or its original German variant, not only because it is historically rooted, but also because it avoids some of the drawbacks and limitations of other potential candidates, like the too narrow concept of “fencing manual”. Indeed, the historical use of the word fechten, like English “to fight”, Dutch “vechten”, was very large and encompassed all kinds of combat, armed and unarmed, and way more than merely “to fence”, which originally means “to defend”.7 But can we define formally the notion of “Fight Book” and determine its place within the fabric of literary genres, so that we have a tool to decide what counts as one in specific cases. The question seems daunting, given the sheer number, variety and heterogeneity of the sources concerned, and since in reality many cross-overs between genres exist.8 There are, however, a few characteristics that stand out generally and which may be useful. Fight Books, Fechtbücher, then, is the terminus technicus used to indicate a vast and heterogeneous collection of manuscripts and printed books, destined to transmit on paper (or parchment) in a systematised way a highly complex system of gestures or bodily actions, often, but not always, involving the use of weapons of different sorts. The system represents a body of experience-based oral knowledge9 concerning all aspects of individual combat, both armed and unarmed, and taking place in different socio-cultural contexts and material situations, and thus throws a whole new light on the fundamental question of the relation between action and communication.10 The group comprises fencing manuals in the classical sense, but also works on unarmed combat, mounted combat, combat in armour,11 combat against multiple opponents, and combinations of those. Situations envisaged comprise primarily forms of normed or ritualised civilian combat like judicial duels, duels of honour or competition, as well as self-defense. The fact that military usage, although not absent, is rather marginal may come in as a surprise,12 but it is clear from the material that focuses almost exclusively on combat in pairs13 and in circumstances subject to rules and normed behaviour.14 The period from which the presently known treatises stem ranges from the early 14th c., well into the 17th c., and thus spans the historical shift from the European middle ages through the Renaissance and into the Early Modern era, a period of profound cultural transformation at least according to conventional historical wisdom. Sources moreover can be found in many different cultural and linguistic realms. In their material appearance, the works confront us with an equally resplendent variety of codicological and iconographical approaches, clearly connected to the didactical and rhetorical means, aims and audiences pursued and addressed in every single one of them.15 Examples range from private text-only notebooks to works combining illustrations and text in all possible combinations of richness and sparsity, as well as printed works featuring a similar spectrum of textual and illustrative exuberance.16 As indicated above, the raison d’être of these works always implies some form of transmission of a highly complex system of gestures or bodily actions, often, but not always, involving the use of edged weapons of different sorts. This gestural system is referred to in the older sources as an art, a “knightly art”, and codified in different ways which are meaningful to the public intended and to the type of combat the author had in mind. From the earliest sources on, we find a differentiation between fighting in schimpfe (mock fighting, i.e., fighting for demonstrations or competitions17) or fighting in ernste (serious fighting, i.e., for matters of life or death), where it nevertheless is clear that the former is seen as a prerequisite to and a preparation for the latter.18 Furthermore, Fight Books could be destined for either a very restricted audience or, in contrast, for one as wide as possible, and all nuances between these two extremes.19 Addressees are peers and members of fraternities or schools, burghers or craftsmen united in guilds,20 or the elites, rich and powerful, who are presented with resplendent volumes in order to instruct, flatter, indulge and seek favour from. This is not surprising when one keeps in mind that the right to keep and bear arms was a fundamental aspect of the culture of the day.21 When restricted, if ever, then the restrictions applied usually to very specific circumstances and to well-defined groups, even though authorities tried regularly to extend their control. An example22 of that fact is the prohibition on holding a fencing school within the walls of the city of London contained in the Liber albus, a common law codex dating back to 1410. The prohibition is, intriguingly enough, in the section Of Measures and Balances, itself preceded by a chapter on the rights and duties Of Apprentices, and in which the fate of people cheating and therefore abusing trust is described: “And that no person shall keep a school for fencing or for buckler-play within the city, under pain of imprisonment.”23 A page further we find the context for this prohibition, and the category of people exempted from it: Of persons wandering by Night It is also forbidden that any person shall be so daring as to be found going or wandering about the streets of the City after curfew rung out at Saint Martin’s Le Grand and Saint Laurence, or at Berkyngchirche, with sword or buckler, or with other arm for doing mischief whereof evil suspicion may arise, or in any other manner; unless it be some great lord or other substantial person of good reputation [. . .].24 The complexity of the corpus, by content as much as by means of presentation, raises baffling obstacles when it comes to ordering and classifying the sourcetexts in a manner that is both as manageable and as non-reductive as possible. Codicological criteria and physical appearance provide an acceptable way out of this dilemma, so that schemes dividing the corpus along these lines gain currency in the recent literature.25 Daniel Jaquet proposes in his dissertation26 a classification that works along two main axes: material and content. The first has three subdivisions according to the codicological type of the source text concerned: books, collections and miscellanies. The other axis also has three subdivisions, this time following the internal organisation and presentation of the content of the considered source: textual, illustrated, mixture. This method allows him to order the material related to armoured combat in a satisfactory way. 2 A Shorthand status quaestionis The historiography of the domain is intricate.27 A first wave of revived interest in the ancient martial arts of Europe occurs towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Enthusiasts and researchers alike start to publish works on and editions of some of the treatises with which we are so familiar by now, such as for example the Italian works of Fiore.28 In depth historical studies and first attempts at sociocultural interpretation begin to see the light of day.29 A vivid practice of reconstitution develops concomitant to this editorial work, much like during the second pioneering phase we witnessed in the second half of the 20th century. Practitioners, often part of the military and mostly highly skilled sports fencers themselves turned out to be avid collectors.30 The result of their efforts continues to benefit researches in the field of Historical European Martial Arts studies to the present day. An outstanding example that merits mention here is the Corble collection, now at Leuven University Library, in Belgium.31 Corble (1883–1944) was a British olympic sabre fighter of repute, since a sabre contest named after him is held annually up to this day. His attitude towards the subject is nicely summed up in the two pictures below, featuring his copy of Dubois’s Essai sur l’Escrime, and a newspaper picture of himself that he pasted on the inside of its frontpage, in Elizabethan outfit and demonstrating before a public a fencing bout of that period. The outbreak of the First World War and its aftermath might well be one of the reasons why this first Historical European Martial Arts-revival did not last. The most recent chapter to this historiographical saga stems mainly from Academia and is the one we are living today. As already mentioned, the Fight Books’ corpus was rediscovered a second time during the second half of the twentieth century, independently but simultaneously by scholars and practitioners alike. The German manuscript corpus attracted especially the attention of philologically and historically oriented scholars, while practitioners often focused on early books and on the later, lavishly illustrated manuscripts, which became more and more electronically available over the last two decades, as facsimiles, transcriptions and translations of wildly diverging quality. However, scientific editions in the strict sense are non-extistent up to today, while good academic editions of single works remain rare.32 Pragmatic interpretations and experimentation of gestures are nonetheless objects of ongoing experimentation and proof of concepts on a scholarly level, but have not yet found solid methodological ground. Pragmatism is the rule. As the reader will notice, this volume bears the traces of this state of affairs in the field, in that researchers from different types of backgrounds contribute to it.33 A second, and lasting, attempt started during the second half of the 20th century. The pioneering work venturing into this new research domain is Martin Wierschin’s study of the German Fight Book literature related to the school of the semi-legendary figure Meister Johannes Liechtenauer,34 His work coincides with the renewed interest in technical literature (Fachliteratur) in general sparked by the work of Eis.35 Wierschin’s attempt to characterise and categorise the corpus was, as mentioned before, pushed further by Hils,36 who added considerably to the list of sources available and made a first attempt at outlining their mutual interrelations by means of stemmatical analysis. Although the subject was taken up by a few dedicated scholars like Anglo and pioneering researchers like Clements37 afterwards, interest for these sources in the Anglo-Saxon world was sparked primarily by enthusiasts and martial arts practitioners, who were and are interested in them from a mainly empirical point of view. No doubt that their work has much merit in itself, but it often falls short when put to the test of academic research and publishing criteria. In the German-, French-, Italian-, and Spanish speaking world, the Fight Book literature has been the subject of academic research in which specific aspects of the corpus, like its communicative strategies,38 its sociological role or its iconography39 have been the focus of attention, but its accessibility and resonance into other fields remains relatively limited.40 An interesting and quickly developing meeting point between the earlier empirical approach and a plethora of scholarly disciplines including “hard”science is presented by recent work in the field of experimentation,for which the Fight Books evidently constitute a gratifying study-object, but also here a lot of work still remains to be done in order to get the results more widely known.41 The principal aim of the present volume is to open the field to the academic community at large. In our compendium, we shall present a status quaestionis to this amazing corpus, that reveals the existence of a European martial arts tradition in the proper sense of the word, as well as offering the reader some of the most state-of-the-art research going on in the field. This volume therefore serves both as an introduction and as a research tool, intended to guide both the novice historian and the interested specialist into broader and deeper levels of encounter and understanding. The aim of the editors is, in other words, to foster further research in the new field of Historical European Martial Arts Studies by bringing it to a wide international academic audience, to open up sources to historians hitherto unaware of them, as well as to specialists in other fields of cultural and humanist study,42 like comparative literature,43 sociology,44 archaeology45 and so on, so that specialist cross-overs and interdisciplinary approaches needed to do justice to this unique material may be facilitated and bring new insights to the field. Given the astonishing number of sources and the variety of the material at hand, the question how the Fight Books could escape notice for so long itself merits attention as it concerns the sociology of history as a science. Suffice it here to say that we owe to the 19th century a common prejudice that medieval combat was unmethodical and merely based on strength,46 a prejudice that has taken foothold in popular imagination by way of contemporary fiction and cinematography. Indeed, sophisticated individual combat skills are something we spontaneously associate with the East.
But there are laudable attempts by more and more scholars, museum curators and independent researchers to rectify persistent erroneous images about the European martial traditions by organising dedicated exhibitions,47 public conferences48 or publishing their work with pragmatic insights.49 It would please the editors if the publication of this volume could contribute to the rectification of this misguided view of our own cultural heritage. 3 Fight Books as a Literary Genre In order to avoid confusion, it makes sense to point out the difference between the Fight Book corpus and the more commonly known “art of war” literature, which is associated with large scale warfare, tactics and strategy. In military history, such treatises on the art of war are well known, at least when compared to our corpus.50 Many examples from Antiquity onwards survive, most famously Vegetius’ Epitoma Rei Militaris (De Re Militari),51 a theoretical treatise on the technical aspects as well as the principles of warfare (4th C. AD), but also texts on more technical aspects of military campaigns, like e.g., De Rebus Bellicis, on the construction of war machines, or De Munitionibus Castrorum, on the organisation of military camps (3rd C. AD).52 We pointed out earlier that the interconnections between the Fight Book literature and military practice in its different aspects are complex and far from self-evident.53 The construction of war machines, however, provides a cross-over into the genre of literature that concerns us here.54 This raises the question of the specific place of the corpus in the larger context of period non-fictional literature.
As noted previously, according to the sources, fighting is seen by their authors as an art in the traditional sense, a body of knowledge and practices that has to be diligently practiced, developed and transmitted through individual apprenticeship under the guidance of a competent master. It can be shown, demonstrated, understood and broken down into pieces according to the masters’ interpretation and preference, and that allow for systematic teaching and a direct didactical approach. The learning process involved is essentially based on direct sense-contact and oral communication; and operates by means of imitation.55 When taking its subject matter into account it comes as no surprise that the corpus is subsumed under the category of period literature concerning the arts in general. Fight Books constitute a genre, a category in its own right within this larger corpus. They belong to the broad category of nonfictitious literature and fall under the subdivision of the artes-literature of a period that spans, roughly, from the high middle ages to the aftermath of the renaissance. Artes-literature is the vast collection of written testimonia found throughout Europe and in many different vernacular languages, that deals with what we would call to-day professional or technical subjects, intended for either didactical or practical use, or both.56 The distribution of this type specific of technical literature throughout the different parts of Europe is very uneven, however. While Fight Books constitute the largest subset in the artesliterature in the German speaking world, in the Dutch-speaking world—one of the richest when it comes to artes-literature per se—not a single item is listed in the monumental repertorium published by Jansen-Sieben in 1989.57 In order to create some order in the overwhelming chaos and heterogeneity of medieval sources dealing with knowledge transmission, Eis had the brilliant idea of using the original scholastic framework as his basic tool for classification.58 Following that long-standing tradition, the martial art encoded in the Fight Books belongs to the artes mechanicae, and within those, to the the artes theatricae.59 But it is far from clear what this classification originally intended, so we shall discuss shortly these traditional divisions.
4 Classifications Old and New In the tradition of the School, three different fundamental series of artes are distinguished: artes liberales, artes mechanicae and artes magicae or incertae.60 The use of the term artes mechanicae is first attested in Johannes Scotus Erigena, who never lists them in full, but who distinguishes them from the liberal arts along Aristotelian lines by explaining that the liberal arts arise “naturally in the soul”, while the mechanical arts have their origin in “some imitation or human devising”.61 Three centuries later, at the dawn of the 12th century Renaissance, Hugh of Saint Victor wrote his Didascalicon,62 an encyclopedia that not only transmits, but reinterprets the ancient tradition with respect to the arts. According to Hugh of Saint Victor, the seven liberal arts of the mind, free from day-to-day cares, were complemented by seven mechanical arts depending on skill and necessary for survival. He lists them as follows: fabricmaking, armament, commerce, and agriculture, hunting, medicine, theatrics.63 It is in this latter category that Hugh of Saint Victor places what will be called later martial art. In the modern literature this classification is accepted64 but generally taken on face value and seen as rather unproblematic, given the obvious connection to the attested German translation Hofkünste, French arts de cour, interpreted as courtly art, ritterliche Künst, arts chevaleresques. But there is an evident tension between the lower status attributed to the art of fighting as eygen, unfrei (unfree), and the at least implicit claim that this art is practiced by or destined for Ritter (knights).65 Hugh of Saint Victor is himself quite clear on this. We call these the liberal arts, he says, and the others the mechanical arts, because the first group is leisurely and practiced by the nobility only, while the second group is productive and remunerative, and that is why commoners find their place therein.66 Three centuries later exactly this distinction re-appears in a German juridical compendium, in which the ständisch angelegten Gegensätze frei und (leib-)eigen (the socially opposing notions free and serf) are used to characterise them.67 The Aristotelian distinction between teknē and epistēmē accounts only partially for resolution of this paradox by the re-evaluation that those arts must have undergone, because the recognition of the validity of knowledge partaking in the physical realm was already plain in Johannes Erigena’s original distinction. Interestingly, the seven subcategories of Hugh of Saint Victor’s theatricae are based on the spaces in which they are practiced. He chooses “theatricus” as his label for the whole kind because it used to be the place where people gathered for the purpose of playing more often than elsewhere. The examples he gives are based on a past that no longer existed in his own time, as he sadly recognises when he comments that that the ancients “counted all these diversions as legitimate activities” because in their wisdom they allowed for the healthy release of pent-up energies68 in places designed for such a purpose, “lest people should go off in various groups and get up to all sorts of mischief and misbehaviour.”69 Clearly, a direct inference from Hugh of Saint Victor’s text to contemporary medieval practice is hazardous. Theatrum, when translated into German, is indeed Hof, but just like Hof in its original meaning of an open air space where specific activities can take place under the eye of a gathering of people.70 It is only in a later time that Hof in the elevated meaning of juridical court (originally held in the open air as well), and royal court gained currency in this context. A growing lexical discrepancy between Latin original and vernacular rendering might indicate some interesting, but hardly visible, sociocultural change. The validity of Hugh of Saint Victor’s original observation remains unscathed from the viewpoint of cultural history. It is in accordance with the observation made by Huizinga in his famous work on play as a constitutive element to culture per se.At the origin of all competition or combat we find play, that means an agreement to accomplish something in a predesigned space and time environment, and according to pre-set rules.71 It results in a release of tension and it does so because as an event it stands outside of the normal course of daily life. This insight, however, does not so much solve a problem as that it rather creates one. The deep interconnection between play or game and war72 is rooted in originally often funeral73 rites that structure reality by disrupting it, while at the same time restoring it.74 Every time we think we grasp the vestiges of that reality as it presents itself to us in these enigmatic sources, by categorising it as either/or, it slips out of our hands, leaving us with the realisation of the shallowness of the mindset that forces us into such simplistic schemes. These sources speak to us from a distant past, and there is a lot we can learn from them, on condition we are prepared to listen. 5 Plan of the Book PART I—Fight Books and methodological issues through disciplinary lenses While attempting to outline the boundaries of the heterogeneous corpus of Fight Books from 1305 to 1630, this section seeks to frame the primary sources and places their analysis within different disciplinary approaches, methods and core problematics. Dawson (chap 3) browses the previous attempts of codification of martial gesture in late Antiquity and the Byzantine world, while proposing some methods to identify such gestures in Art. Linguistics and issues related to termini technici are put forward by Bauer (chap 4) with the Fight Books written in middle high german as example. Kellet (chap 5) proposes comparisons between the writing of martial gesture in literary narratives and in technical literature. The iconography of the Fight Books is appreciated through its practical purposes and its semiology by Kleinau (chap 6), who points out critical issues in the relation between text and images in the Fight Books. Verelst (chap 7) stresses some of the crucial methodological advantages of the use of sound editorial techniques and the study of textual filiation, more specificially for the middle high German corpus. Finally the benefits and limits of the modern day interpretation of the martial gesture are reviewed by Clements (chap 8), as experience, and Jaquet (chap 9), as experimentation. PART II—From the Books to the Arts: The fighting arts in context This section explores the concepts of tradition or school of fighting, incorporating chapters offering overviews of the source material sorted by language areas and cultural realms, as well as relevant contextual aspects of the fighting praxis related to specific Fight Books. Most of the chapters address general issues about authors, intended audience and reception, as well as heterogeneity of the corpus. German sources are explored by Hagedorn (chap 10); Italian by Mondschein (chap 11); Spanish by Valle (chap 12); French by Dupuis (chap 13); Dutch by Gevaert/van Noort (chap 14) and English by Wagner (chap 15). PART III—Martial Arts, martial culture and case studies This last section is composed on the one hand of two case studies based on 14th c. sources and on the other of two sociocultural contributions, analysing key elements shaping martial cultures in the late Medieval and Early Modern period. Burkart (chap 16) explores the composition modalities and the content of the first example of the Liechtenauer tradition (the German auctoritas for 200 years), by offering a closer look into a miscellany both typical and atypical of the corpus. Based on unsolved issues about the first known Fight Book, Cinato (chap 17) explores the iconological tradition of one specific fighting style in the corpus: the sword and buckler. Tlusty (chap 18) offers insight into the martial identities and sword culture in urban milieu of South Germany and Cavina (chap 19) delves into duelling culture from normative literature in the late and early modern Italy.
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