Greg Mele has weighed in over at SFI:
Well, I just used some Christmas money to get a copy of this book, and have been reading it. I'm not done, but I've read enough to have some comments.
As regards the content of this book, there are a number of really good pieces, a few others that are fine, but seem a little dated in their analysis, and at least two that are just turgid.
There are a number of articles I liked. I really liked Szabolcs Waldman's article on Martin Hundsfeldt's lessons for using the shortened sword (aka "half-swording"), Bart Walczak's article on Gladiatoria (I'm just happy to see anyone working with that text, as it is a favorite of mine!) and Brian Hunt's contribution on Mair.
Getting anything from Sydney Anglo is a nice treat, and both of his contributions here are excellent. OTOH, Le Jeu has been published twice in academic journals and has been available all over the web for the better part of a decade, if not a decade. I have no idea if they got permissions for Archaeologia to reprint it here, but there is nothing new or exciting about this.
And that leads me to the biggest problem I've seen thus far - a lot of this seems to be retread from the ARMA website and elsewhere. Certainly, I believe that Jeffrey Hull's articles were originally submitted some time ago (and announced here), as are JC's articles on Fiore and di Grassi. These latter two are several years old, but nothing seems to have been done to clean-up or revise them. So at least six of the eighteen contributions are neither new, nor do they appear to be revised. There's nothing wrong with that, but it may factor into the question of do you want to spend $50?
While it's true I'm not a fan of John Clements, that doesn't change the fact that the Fiore and di Grassi entries are by far the weakest elements I've seen thus far. As Ilkka suggests, the Fiore article in particular suggests that the author has never done more than a cursory study of the manuscripts, has primarily compared the images and perhaps worked off of some of the dubious Pissani-Dossi translations that were available five - six years ago.
I don't have time to cover everything, but here's a few examples that readily come to mind:
The author states that Fiore is a Bolognese master. He is a Furlan (that is, from Friului, in far north-eastern Italy), who took service with a number of clients in Milan's sphere of influence, and ultimately dedicates his work to the Marquis de Ferrara. We know this because Fiore tells us his origin in the first sentence of each manuscript. We know about whom he taught because he tells us in the Getty Ms. We know where these men were and what they did (in most cases), because they were well-known condottieri, several of whom you can construct a working bio of by using Google.
Fiore's tradition is represented by the four distinct manuscripts we have, some later-period transcriptions of those texts, and the work of Vadi, a later master in the same tradition, who adds a few distinctive flourishes of his own to the material. Bologna is the whom to a completely distinctive and unique tradition of fencing (that does indeed use similar concepts and, at times, terminology), that was founded at least a generation after Fiore wrote the Flower of Battle.
Now, everything I just wrote was readily available information in 2000. Some of it - such as Fiore's origin and his relationship with (or rather, parallel position to) the Bolognese school was well known in the 19th century, when two different books were published on the man.
This seems a small slip, I know, but the technical analysis is just as bad.
In the same intro material, Fiore is said to show combat against multiple opponents. This is incorrect. Vadi discusses this briefly (one sentence - don't use thrusts), while Fiore shows are certain sections in the manuscript where a specific defense (actually, almost always the same one - a rising parry - sometimes with the true edge, sometimes with the false - more on this later) is said to be good against multiple attacks. The text will show three men, each prepared to attack in a different fashion. If you *read the text* it is made clear that they do not represent multiple attackers but *different kinds of attack*. So, the defense is good against cuts, thrusts and thrown weapons, not against three men attacking at once.
Again, this has been known and discussed in secondary sources since the turn of the last century, and common knowledge in the WMA community since the late 90s.
When discussing Fiore's segno, John asserts that it is the only one of its kind. Odd, since Vadi has a distinct one of his own, Kal uses a similar symbolic figure without the cutting diagram super-imposed, most Italian masters from Marozzo through to the modern day who illustrate the cuts use similar cutting diagrams, as do at least two German texts of the 15th c. So I'm not sure what the "unique" part is. The exact image chose is certainly unique, but that's like saying that no one else painted the Mona Lisa, so Da Vinci was unique in painting a woman.
The author also discusses how parries with the longsword are generally made with cuts from above. I assume he gets this by looking at the images of the masters of crossed swords, which show figures standing corps-a-corps. Problem is, this completely ignores the fact that those figures simply represent the places along the length of the blades that the swords can cross - the punta (last third), mezza (middle third) or tutta (third nearest the cross). If you read the descriptions of the guards, of the single play of the longsword used from boar's tooth against three masters with different types of attacks, of the use of the partizan (ghiavarina) from the same guard, etc, etc, you find that Fiore also uses the *false edge* to defend with rising parries - a hallmark of all Italian fencing in the 15th and 16th centuries.
He also makes this odd remark that Fiore does not emphasize fighting stances. This is truly bizarre, since his entire art is built around a sequence of "masters", the first of which is the posta - position or guard. Everything in the art is taught via the guards, and much like the Bolognese masters, actions are traced as moving from guard to guard. (Indeed, as Vadi later expresses so eloquently.)
The last example I'll give is the author's questioning of who attacks and defends in the colpo di villano. How you can question this when the Getty text begins:
"Questo zogho sie chiamado colpo di villano e sta in tal modo. Zoe che si de aspettare lo villano che lo traga cum la spada."
"This play is called the villain's blow and it is made in this way: that he ought to await the villain's attack with the sword."
Mystery solved.
There are many, many other instances like this, where we aren't talking about interpretive differences that are wildly at odds with other researchers, but rather are simply mistakes that can only be made by having never read the text, having read very little, if any, of the secondary literature (most of which is also in Italian), and basing the conclusions on the illustrations, without knowing what the captions say.
This would have been a *very* bad essay in 2002. In 2008 it is an embarrassment to be included with the far more serious and exacting essays I mention above.
Of the other pieces I read, I was underwhelmed by the Boon of the English Flourysh, but basically you have to accept a certain interpretation of how the English masters were using that term, and how it's been adopted in ARMA. I don't, so I'm probably not really the target audience. I still have to read the staff-fighting, Sainct-Didier and Petter article, so I can't comment. John's editorials are not my cup of tea, so I likely will skip "Towards a New Perspective."
So I guess the question is - should you buy this book? I guess that depends. A lot of the material is retread from previous on-line versions, and two of the essays by John Clements are truly horrid. But there are also some good pieces in here as well, and there can be merit in having a nice, bound version of some of those digital translations or photocopied articles. Either way, I don't think the book should be dismissed as "tripe", because it's not as a whole. I think this is one of those - take these comments for what they are, and decide what your principle interests are.
EDIT - this was supposed to go in the "Masters trash talk" thread. I have NO IDEA how it became its own seperate thread. Irksome.
-B.
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