Description
Book SynopsisThis open access book is the first publication to provide a comparative framework for the study of martial culture and historical martial arts in Europe and Asia, in particular in Italy and China. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of martial studies, contributors to this volume include historians, archeologists, art historians, scholars of fencing literature, metallurgists, as well as contemporary master swordsmiths and masters-of-arms in historical martial arts. Assembling researchers from these diverse fields, this book offers a multi-perspectival and dynamic view of martial culture across time and space.
The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary significance of this book cannot be overemphasized. Whereas a number of contributors are internationally recognized and, indeed, leading authorities in their respective fields; for example, Jeffrey Shaw has been a world-leading new media artist and scholar since the 1970s, while Ma Mingda is a well-known historian and the contemporary founder of Chinese martial studies; and while there are significant overlaps in their research interests, this book brings their research within a single volume for the first time. Equally significant, the book is structured in such a way to reflect the various core aspects of martial studies, particularly in relation to the study of historic sword culture, including history, culture, philosophy, literature and knowledge transmission, material culture, as well as the technical aspects of historical fencing.
As one of the first titles on martial studies, this book becomes a reference not only for scholars taking an interest in this subject, but also for historians; scholars with interest in Chinese and/or Italian history (particularly of the Medieval or early modern periods), the history of international relations in Asia / Far East; anthropologists; scholars of martial (arts) studies and researchers in sword-making and/or historic metallurgy.
Table of ContentsI. Sword Culture from Socio-historic Perspectives
1. Roberto Gotti & Enrico Valseriati, Stratification in Italian Martial Culture2. Gong Jian, Development of the Yanlingdao from the Yuan to Qing dynasty3. Daniel Jaquet, The Rise of the Two-Handed Sword in the Age of Staff-Weapons4. Ma Lianzhen, The Origin of the Two-Handed Sword in China
II. Fight Books: the Transmission and Interpretation of Knowledge
5. Omar Ma, Ming Dynasty Chinese Fencing Treatises6. Miriam Vogelaar, Fabris’s 1606 Fencing Manual: an Analytical Bibliographical Study7. Manuel Valle Ortiz, The Ferrara Manuscript: Destreza and Vulgar
III. Material Culture: Weapons, Technology, & Aesthetics
8. Hu Xiaojun, Rediscovering Swordmaking Techniques of Ancient China: Insights from Reconstructing a Han-Dynasty Ring-Pommel Dao9. Gabriele Tonelli, Historical Sword-making Techniques in Northern Italy in the XVI and XVII Centuries
IV. Classical Martial Art Traditions
10. Ma Lianzhen, Duanbing and the History of Fencing in China11. Jacopo Penso, Interpreting Achille Marozzo’s System of Sword-fighting: A Contemporary Case Study 12. Axel Pettersson, Applying Pedagogic Methods in Historic European Martial Arts
