Even a superficial study of fencing treatises published at different times will readily show that the art of fencing constantly changes with time. However, while large differences between separate treatises are easily identified, pinpointing how these changes develop is much more difficult. One requirement for tracking how a single fencing lineage evolves, is that such a lineage can be identified, and contains sufficient different (written) works that can be studied. Unfortunately, historical European fencing masters rarely documented who they received their instruction from, making it difficult, if not impossible, to identify fencing lineages. One exception to this is the fencing lineage of Paduan fencing master Salvator Fabris, whose fencing lineage can be documented with some certainty, and contains a relatively significant number of treatises by different authors. In this contribution, we will analyse the fencing lineage of Salvator Fabris, and in particular his Caminiren (“proceeding with resolution”) to identify how the teachings within a martial lineage may evolve gradually with time, considering that teachings may develop both as the ideas of individual masters evolve as they gain experience (and age), and as subsequent masters (or fencers) adapt these teachings to their own preferences.

While numerous fencing masters and other enthusiasts wrote down their ideas on how to fence, and how to teach fencing, most of these works now exist without strong martial context, as the authors rarely inform us who taught them how to fence. With Historical European Martial Arts, the legacy of the 16th to 17th century fencing master Salvator Fabris may be one rare exception to this. After Fabris published his major work, Lo Schermo, in Copenhagen in 1606, and then returned to Padua (where he died in 1618), numerous works on fencing where written and published by authors who either claimed to have been students of Salvator Fabris himself, or of one of his students in turn; or to have some other connection to Signor Salvatore. As subsequent works by other authors may be linked to those works and authors in turn, we are able to sketch out instructional and textual lineages that are rooted in the well-known teachings of Fabris. In this paper, we aim to identify potential students of Salvator Fabris, as well as their students in turn. Doing so, we will focus specifically on those students who became fencing masters themselves and those who wrote their own treatises on fencing (both fencing masters and other enthusiasts) – i.e., on those who left behind a documentable legacy through which the subsequent evolution of Fabris’s style of fencing in the 17th and 18th centuries can be studied.

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.