The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe.

Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. xii + 28 color illus + 384 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-300-08352-1.

Sydney Anglo's remarkable book points in two rather different directions. On the one hand, it explores in detail a technical, even arcane branch of Renaissance knowledge: that which explained how to fight without guns, using the range of gruesome instruments that the period had available for the purpose. On the other hand, it offers reflections on the place of all this fighting in Renaissance cultural and social life -- a very large place, Anglo argues, to which historians have not given sufficient attention. He includes art historians in the complaint; and one merit of the book is to show the interest that contemporary artists had in depicting fighting, mainly to illustrate printed training manuals. From this corpus, The Martial Arts draws more than two hundred beautifully reproduced and pertinent illustrations of its subject matter.

Anglo focuses on the masters who taught techniques of personal violence. This was, he shows, a thriving profession, well suited to a violent world and already wellestablished in late medieval cities, despite occasional legal prohibitions. These men established schools across the continent, and long before printing some had begun describing their techniques in written form. The sixteenth century brought an explosion of these writings, from all the centers of European culture. With impressive erudition, Anglo explores this literary genre, organizing his exposition around the different forms of combat that the masters taught. Knowledge of sword fighting was essential but insufficient; fighting with pikes, axes, daggers, and bare hands had also to be mastered, the latter two as components of sword fighting, and the techniques of fighting on horseback remained relevant despite the increasing prevalence of infantry warfare. In explicating these techniques, Anglo expertly makes his way through a mass of technical t erminology, distinguishing between practical and implausible techniques, establishing differences among national traditions, and measuring change over time. Traditional themes of Renaissance interpretation emerge as well from this literature, for the masters had to consider issues that preoccupied other participants in the high culture of the age. They too worried about relations between ancient and modern knowledge and between individual and society, since many of their techniques better suited the lone duelist than the disciplined soldier. Anglo draws from these sources a dark picture of Renaissance personal combat. Theorists understood that lives were at risk in every fight, and therefore no one could afford scruples about shady technique; some teachers insisted that even training take place with unprotected weapons, to accustom their pupils to the emotions of real struggle.

But exactly how violent a world was this? Anglo fully demonstrates how unpleasant the martial arts might be in application (indeed, he describes numerous forms of unpleasantness that the reader might riot otherwise have envisioned). He is less concerned to define larger contexts, and thus he says little about numbers of duels and street fights, and very little about the participants' social standing. Some years ago, Francois Billacois argued that Renaissance duelling was highly place specific, epidemic in France but fairly infrequent in other countries. Anglo firmly believes that the habit was common everywhere, and he sees the martial arts teachers as both product and cause of its prevalence; everyone needed some training, given the likelihood of assault, and well-trained fighters were eager to provoke quarrels. Only anecdotal evidence is offered, though, and the relations between martial arts and daily life do not receive systematic analysis. Another open question concerns relations among different forms o f violence. Anglo returns at several points to the development of court culture during the Renaissance, which he sees as marked by the nobility's "mutation from warrior to ceremonial puppet" (169). But these were also years in which armies grew in size and suffered rising percentages of casualties, making it very likely that the seventeenth-century courtier would encounter real war as well as balletic jousting--and that wartime experiences would be especially horrific. Sites of upper class violence clearly changed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it is less clear that its total quantity diminished.

Questions thus arise about some of Anglo's broadest claims, but these are peripheral to his real subject matter. As an explication of what Renaissance fighting was like, his book is an impressive achievement.