This was a niceley written response but I frankly don't think mr Angeles gets it. I may possibly respond later in more detail, but I have to be off to work so I'll just make a couple of brief points right now (well, brief for me), to correct a couple of basic fallacies.
1) Fencing, meaning the art of defense, applies to all WMA equally if not more so than to modern sport fencing.
2) With all due respect, mr. Angeles should perhaps learn a bit more about the period in order to discuss it intelligently, and for that matter about the modern WMA community, as this comment...
For instance, knights fought on horseback. I have yet to see any organization that recreates actual horseback swordfighting
... indicates a certain degree of ignorance.
People have done reconstruction of fencing from horseback for some time now, including sparring with swords and even tournament style jousting.
Knights were not the only people who fought or studied fencing under the masters. It was common study among 'gentlemen' and basically anyone of means.
In addition, the period in which most of the fechtbuchen were written, in the 15th - 16th centuries, knights and other soldiers often fought on foot, as they did frequently in many battles dating back to the middle ages.
However, most of the fechtbuchs that I am aware of being studied at the moment do not even deal with
military combat at all, they cover instead one sort or other of civilian combat, primarily judicial combat, duels and armed self defense.
These ranged from relatively formal if multifacted conditions in the case of judicial combat, to essentially anything goes in the case of a violent encounter in the city street or in the open country. Thus, the emphasis by the Western Masters upon flexibility (and sparring, see below).
In the fechtbuchs I have read, one single solution to a given problem is rarely presented as the only solution, unlike in many EMA traditions.
3) If people in sparring clips on the web occasionally seem sloppy and/ or tentative, it's because A) as John C. himself has pointed out over and over, the systematic reconstruction of WMA is still in it's infancy. Even the most advanced groups like ARMA have only been going on for a relatively few years, and most individual students have formally studied it for a signifcantly lesser amount of time. Videos of sparring seen on the internet often depict groups of students in the process of learning basic or intermediate techniques, they are not demonstrations of masters at the top of their art. The people who are making these clips in an effort to learn more from them.
and B) perhaps equally important, they are
sparring, facing the unpredictable situation of actually fighting with an unrerstrained, unrestrected, aggressive opponent who is trying to strike an often painful blow against you and defeat you. Even professional boxers can often look somewhat tentative and even sloppy during certain points in a boxing match, thats because the situation is unpredictable and dangerous.
Even with experts, a sparring match will never look as elegant as someone doing a kata or a 'flourysh', because the latter can be practiced to the point of perfection. With enough practice, a little time, and the magic of editing, I could if I wanted to tape the rather raw members of my group doing flouryshes which looked nearly perfect. That doesn't make them perfect fighters any more than the thousands of EMA trained fighters who only know katas... which brings me to my last point,
4) I cannot speak for ARMA, but I do believe that they share my opinion to some extent that sparring is very important. Their emphasis on sparring is in fact the primary reason why I personally have so much interest in and respect for this group, and have worked with them in the past. It means they put their money where their mouth is.
Learning a martial art as katas only is ridiculous, it means you are ultimately learning only a dance, not how to fight. You cannot understand how the actual fighting will take place unless you put it to the test (whic the best EMA schools do, with constant sparring!). All the elegance and most of the repertoire of the katas in so many EMA arts dissapear almost entirely on that UFC fighting floor, as they do with often tragic results when anyone who has studied martial arts without sparring faces their first real opponent.
WMA, at least at this stage, is not about trying to recreate fighting techniques based on bizarre unique circumstances, nobody that I know of has tried to specialize for example in fighting in wierd restrictive judicial combat gear yet. Thats partially because WMA is as I stated already in it's infancy, but it's also because the Masters were to a large degree generalists who tried to prepare their students to face nearly any kind of opponent. That is why sparring is so key now and was then: it is the only way to ensure the integrity and validity of the fighting art.
Sparring, or one or another type of non-lethal (or semi-lethal:) mock combat, has also incidentally been a major part of the Western martial tradition for milennia, as it has in many other parts of the world.
That is because ultimately, WMA
is about fighting the
most effective way, even as it is also about fighting the way the masters taught, for they are the same thing. All the fechtbuch techniques figured out so far have turned out to be the very best methods, thats a big part of the attraction of WMA, it's not
just about re-creating history, it's about re-creating historical arts which just happen to
kick ass .
J
