The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe

Inspired by the writings of Michel Foucault, a generation of scholars have written volumes about the history of the human body as a social construct. For all their labors, though, we still know surprisingly little about how our ancestors actually used their bodies—the skills that the anthropologist Marcel Mauss called “techniques du corps,” which range from everyday routines such as styles of walking and sitting to the most challenging surgical procedures. Like ideas, practices have histories. Yet because practices are more often learned through example and apprenticeship than from books, their histories are far more elusive.

Anglo, a historian at the University of Wales who specializes in the ceremonial life of the Renaissance, reconstructs the exacting skills of Europe’s martial arts masters. These men were not just the counterparts of today’s fencing masters and boxing and wrestling coaches; they were also the progenitors of Green Beret and Navy SEALS instructors. From the end of the Middle Ages well into the 17th century, the city streets and country roads of Europe abounded with hotheaded, knife-wielding ruffians and armed brigands. Even among intimates, disagreements over points of honor could escalate into mortal combat.

The insecurity of the world, and the social and cultural aspirations of teachers and pupils alike, had paradoxical consequences. The numerous surviving manuals of European martial arts evoke a gorgeous, stylized world. One wrestling manuscript was illustrated by Albrecht Dürer. Yet masters had to remind their readers that fighting was not merely an aesthetic exercise. Many discouraged the instructional use of rebated (dulled) weapons as an impediment to lifesaving realism.

Anglo organizes his book around styles of fighting. First he introduces the masters and shows how, for all their theory and literary style, their art remained a craft. Books could enrich but not replace hands-on instruction. He considers attempts to create a geometric science of swordsmanship, a movement that created magnificent treatises but was doomed by fencing’s demand for spontaneity and deception. The sword was only the most glamorous of the weapons. The masters also taught fighting with staffs, pikes, and axes, as well as more plebeian skills such as wrestling and combat with daggers and knives.

Anglo ranges from exalted theories to the back-breaking, hamstring-cutting side of Renaissance fighting techniques, but we are left wishing to know more about the practitioners themselves. Who would have thought, for example, that the Hapsburgs would entrust the wrestling instruction of the dukes of Austria to a master named Ott the Jew?

Still, this book is a sumptuous scholarly feast, with delicacies for art historians, bibliophiles, Shakespeare specialists, wrestling fans, Asian martial arts enthusiasts, and graphic designers. Anglo does not shrink from using terms such as prosopopoeic (referring to an object speaking of itself as though a person), but he complements academic rigor with wry humor: Questioning some colleagues’ preoccupation with a shift in style from cutting to thrusting, he writes that “by concentrating on the point, they have missed it completely.”

Now that the president of the Russian Federation, judo master Vladimir Putin, has published his own manual of arms, body skills may be returning to the world stage. This challenging but lucid study raises the curtain.