This article explores how Scholastic notions of the body, mind and cognition inform the didactic principles structuring the Opera nova (1536) by Achille Marozzo (1484-1553). A Bolognese fencing master, Marozzo belonged to a tradition of institutionalized martial training which had historically emphasized its connections to academic discourses of learning. In spite of this, Marozzo’s own work has been interpreted as following a straightforward tradition of copying forms and patterns, without much of an underlying theoretical argument. This article argues that Marozzo does present several conceptual references to Scholastic ideas about the workings of the brain, however, in particular to the mind’s dependence on mental images provided by the senses. Delving into these references not only helps to understand the didactic principles at work in the Opera nova as a whole, but also the specific role Marozzo seems to have attributed to the many woodcuts included in his book. In presenting this argument, this article then argues for the fruitful insights that can be gained from connecting fight books to both medieval and early modern Scholasticism, and the history of early modern art and science.

What is the cultural background of the masters of arms? What is the meaning of the scientific and philosophical references scattered in the fight books corpus? To what extent does the university culture permeate the whole society and more specifically martial culture? These are the leading questions of the present issue.

This paper attempts to look at Fightbooks as literary sources and apply this reasoning to ADVISE reconstruction methodology. First the concepts of Real and Imaginary Worlds is introduced, followed by the distinction between Actors and Roles. Based on descriptions each Actor and Role can be assigned a set of Actions, Decisions, Intentions and Goals that constitute their Behaviours. Depending on Perspective, such Behaviours can be divided into Expected and Unexpected.
 Reconstruction is then looked at as an effort to gain deeper insight into described Roles and Actors through enacting of their Behaviours. Applying these concepts to ADVISE methodology allows for more nuanced and stricter process by focusing on Actions in Phase 1 and Decisions in Phase 2. Phase 5 introduces formal set theory notation that allows for a consistent high-level reasoning about the content of recorded message. Discussion addresses potential criticisms and further applications of this approach, demonstrating how it can bring more clarity to the whole process, especially when it comes to properly defining future experiments.

At the end of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, some authors of the fight books, or those involved in copying or rewriting existing content about fighting techniques used scholastic concepts either explicitly or implicitly. Scholastic concepts are tools, methods or references taken from the European reception of Aristotelian writings during the Middle Ages and its inclusion in academic education. This article attempts a survey of such concepts found in the fight book corpus (1400-1600). It yields information about the representation of the art of fighting as a discipline in the broad organisation of knowledge as cultural and intellectual markers. It also provides information about the social and educational context of both the authorship and the intended audience of the heterogeneous corpus of fight books.

Intellectual historians have rarely attended to the genre of fighting manuals, but these provide a new window on long-debated questions such as the relationship between Scholasticism and Humanism. This article offers a close comparison of the first known fencing manual, the 14-th century Liber de Arte Dimicatoria (Leeds, Royal Armouries FECHT 1, previously and better known as MS I.33), and the corpus of fighting manuals which underwent a remarkable expansion during the 15th and 16th centuries. While the former clearly shows its origins in a scholastic background, the latter is mainly viewed as reflecting its humanist context. To this historiographical division corresponds a linguistic one: MS I.33 is a Latin text, while the rest of the corpus is mainly written in German and Italian. However, exceptions arise, amongst which, Heinrich von Gunterrodt’s Sciomachia et Hoplomachia: sive de Veris Principiis Artis Dimicatoriae (1579), the first text which explicitly refers to I.33. This article will compare these two texts, in order to interrogate their common relation to Scholasticism, namely the traditional frame of the knowledge within the medieval and early modern universities. The intent is to show that (at least some) Renaissance fight books include references to Scholasticism and to provide a better qualification of the nature of such references. The general hypothesis is that a large part of the texts―and products of culture―of the Renaissance that have been read, until recently, exclusively in relation to a humanist intellectual background can valuably be interpreted in the context of a Scholasticism that is still vivid during the period in question.

This article discusses the modern interpretation that Bologna produced a distinctive regional martial tradition, based on the existence of similar treatises. It examines the assumption that a series of fencing masters formed a distinct lineage and that their martial practices formed a tradition separate to martial forms outside of Bologna. As a case study, it also considers the 'Viridario' of Giovanni Filoteo Achillini, a poem that contains instructions on the use of sword an buckler, written in 1504 and asks why this apparently unknown treatise was not used by its author to promote a Bolognese tradition.

Fencing and the art of combat in general can bring you to think of an argument, a serious conversation between two individuals or two groups. Conversely, intellectual disputes and discursive exchanges can be compared to actual duels with the difference that questions, answers, and reasoning replace gestures, defences, and attacks. This rather simplistic vision deserves to be questioned in regard to the medieval and Renaissance periods, in particular from the written productions resulting from the theorisation and the inscription of these two forms of interaction: the scholastic dispute and the art of fencing. This article aims to make the link between the mechanism of the scholastic dispute, which has existed since the Middle Ages and which persists in the Renaissance, and the world of the art of medieval and early modern combat, which is materialised through the treatises of fencing and wrestling written by educated masters-at-arms as well as the practice of public fencing competitions.

The goal of this analysis is to search for a plausible explanation of the rules followed by Pacheco in Libro de las grandezas de la espada to construct the footwork theory explained in it. For this purpose, we are going to geometrically analyse the diagrams presented in the treatise, we are studying it in the order the concepts are explained in the treatise: a presentation of a rigid explanation of the footwork and an apparently low-consistent application of it through the footwork diagrams. Thus, we will compile the data presenting some hypotheses that appear along the way until we can rearrange it to see the pattern that gives us a plausible construction rule for the footwork diagrams. In order to obtain a rule consistent with later Verdadera Destreza treatises and theory, and therefore more plausible as all of them claimed to follow Pacheco’s teachings, we will present a brief analysis of several treatises Common Circle descriptions to see how the conclusions reached match with them. Finally, we are proposing a rule set that Pacheco may have used and an application of it to reconstruct some diagrams of the treatise.

To understand the Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) community, its weapon disciplines, organisational structure and gender, a HEMA census was conducted in 2021 for Germany and Austria and in 2019 for Germany. The 2021 census captures 3186 HEMA practitioners training in 124 locations in Germany and 801 practitioners training in 34 locations in Austria. It is the most comprehensive and detailed dataset of its kind to date. It shows that most HEMA groups are organised as an independent Verein or as part of an umbrella Verein.1 The pandemic had an average effect on the number of practitioners and primarily impacted commercial schools with a 20% reduction in membership. 20% (Germany) and 27.5% (Austria) of all practitioners are identified as female, while 0.75% (Germany) and 3.9% (Austria) of practitioners are identified as nonbinary. Longsword is the most popular weapon discipline, being trained at over 88% of locations in both countries. Runner-up disciplines trained at 40% to 44% of locations include Long Knife, Dagger, Sword & Buckler, Historical Wrestling (Germany), and Dagger, Sword & Buckler and Polearms (Austria). Two-handed swords saw the biggest increase in training locations during the pandemic. HEMA hotspots are in South Germany (Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg), where nearly 39% of all German practitioners train, and in Eastern Austria (Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland), where over 55% of all Austrian practitioners train.