There was indeed a Renaissance - Adrian van Bronswijk

[@robinmarks4771]

Well done, as always. Thank you for providing this content, and thanks to Adrian for an excellent presentation.

[@jeffbutler1614]

Some great insights. Thank you.

[@SchildwachePotsdam]

If you wish to train with us and support us at the same time, head over to www.patreon.com/SchildwachePotsdam for weekly classes, articles and more - thanks! :)

[@SchildwachePotsdam]

There seems to be a sound issue with the data from 32min onwards... which is super strange since nothing changed and is just present in this recording... sorry about that.

[@MartinGreywolf]

I don't agree with the idea that there was a shift in teaching people swordsmanship out of a book that could be correlated with the Renaissance. First premise that we don't see rules in medieval books is already shaky, Fiore has about as much explanation of general principles as Meyer does, and much more that someone like (much later) Godinho or Mair do - and Dobringer is almost nothing but general principles, albeit explained somewhat unclearly. From what I've seen, the entire Bolognese school is written in the older I.33 style as well. What we really see here are two different kinds of treatises. The older I.33 style is meant for someone to learn from that book, or to serve as a reminder. If you go through I.33 play by play, you get a structure of drills that is pretty good at teaching you the ins and outs of the system if you do them in order. Fiore even explicitly states that his book is in order that you should be learning it, and says outright that part of the reason is that the later bits reference the earlier ones. The second kind of books is something like Fabris, Thibault and all of Destreza. They aren't books you are supposed to learn from, they are rigorous scientific proofs. This isn't just me saying so, Carranza and Thibault (to limit myself to the ones I've read) explicitly state this is what they are doing, and their writing is indeed consistent with Aristotelian style of scientific proof. Of the two, only Thibault pays occasional lip service to actually using his book to train, and only in the first few chapters at that. The first kind of book is much easier to pick up and learn, because it doesn't sweat the unimportant details and is structured in a way that is friendly to someone using the art in practice. If I need to know what to do when me and my opponent approach after a bind, I can go to Fiore and look into his stretto section. If I need to know how to defend against a backhand cut, I need to go to the bit of I.33 that deals with tercia and low schutzen. However, there is a lot of room for interpretation and error there - something that isn't there for the second type of book. This second type of book actively fights back against your attempts to understand it (and often to stay awake), but it is incredibly detailed in what your actions should look like and why. It is pretty damn hard to find an answer to "what are my options against an imbrocata" (if you think it is in the On Imbrocades chapter, well... some of it is), but if you have the patience and spreadsheets necessary for it, you can reconstruct what he wants you to do with incredible precision. You can make an argument that the second type of treatise doesn't appear until the Renaissance, but to say that all of "how to stab literature" shifts is going too far. You can argue that Godinho was only a draft (which... okay, yeah, but he had his final organization of text and was just adding bits to clarify), but Mair is very much the first type as well and Silver is 30% the first kind of treatise to 70% angry rant at Frenchmen and Italians.

[@Ehuatl]

The premise that you don't see rules in medieval fightbooks is not necessary in that strong form to support a claim that there was a change in didactics from the medieval to the renaissance period, nor do I think that Adrian is bringing it forward in that strong form. The pointhe is making is, as far as I understand, first, that the medieval fightbooks overwhelmingly use a didactics that follows the ideal of Aristotelian epagoge (as they follw the scholastic Method, that ows a lot to Aristotelian ideas of epagoge): You have an example and from that example the student arrives at the general principles. And second, that Agrippa goes the other way of deucting from principles or that of apagoge. (One should be aware here, that rules are not the same as general principles: "If you thrust, do so in a straight line." is a rule. "The most direct way between two points is a straight line." is a principle.) The renaissance is not a monolithic movement and it's clear that it was an extension out of the medieval (where else should it have come from?) in a certain sense. That said, though, I think one can identify a lot of differences indeed, especially in regard to the didactics, which change. That said not every book was follwoing that movement either. Mayer is areguably more a child of the Late Middle Ages or the Nordic Renaissance, that is in a way an answer to the Italian Renaissance. The same goes for Destreza: Destreza is an entirely late scholastic Reply to the (italian) Platonic renaissance Humanists. That doesn't mean that there was no Renaissance or that there isn't a break in didactics from the medieval to the early modern era. It just says that there were reactions to that break and that those were immediate. That said, if you compare the learly medieval fight books and compare them with those belonging to the early modern era, then you will see that the medieval books were dominated by a scholastic (Aristotelian epagoge-style) didactics, expecting you to look at examples and from that understand the rules and principles (which might or might not be given explicitly). With the reanissance you see a rise in another style of didactics: One that is based on espousing the principles first and expecting the student to deduce the right fencing actions from that. Agrippa is indeed a prime example for that: He gives the principles, then rules and his examples are not meant to explain how to fight, but to show that those principles work. Everything else is for the student to deduce. Fiore is not a very good example for strictly medieval fight books, by the way, as when he wrote his book and where he wrote the book it was already at the cusp of the blossoming of the renaissance. Of course we can expect some foreshadowing there. Furthermore, scientific proof in the Aristotelain style is nothing that is opposed to learning (and neither is anamnesis and deduction in the Platonic sense) opposed to learning. Rather, it is a type of learning! And that idea is still very active in the late scholastic writing of Carranza and Thibault. Late Scholastic works are usually a reaction to platonic-style renaissance didactics, that change from epagoge- to apagoge-style teaching/learning, where the reaction consists in remembering that the Aristotelian/scholastic tradition knows both, employing both in conjunction and then claiming, that even the apagoge is done better by Scholastics then non-Scholastic platonists. The two kinds of fight books you speak about are exactly the result of differences in didactics Adrian speaks about. And if you go through all the books available, categorize them and look at when they were written, then you will see that the 'type one' books are typical of the medieval period, 'type two' books are more typical of the 'renaissace' (or early modern) period - and that the examples from those respective periods are more clearly belonging to the type that's typical for that period than vice versa. (And of course, the Scholastics would claim that their method is 'scientific', just as the platonic humanists claim theirs to be. I think one shouldn't get too hooked on that terminology there, Adrian is clearly using that cum grano salis, referring to Agrippa's claim of being the 'more scientific' one than the scholasitcs, against whom his book is [amongst other things] clearly a jab - pun intended.) I think one can only disagree with what Adrian is proposing here, if one makes the mistake of thinking that a book of the renaissance era claiming to be giving 'scientific proofs' is not meant to teach. That idea is an anachronism born from a modern understanding of what 'scientific proof' is. No, the claim e.g. Agrippa makes is that teaching by scientific proof is superior to teaching by examples (and 'rules of thumb') as the Scholastics do - or he accuses them of doing. The idea of teaching (through books giving explicit instructions for) drills is an even later one. Neither a book like I.33 or of the Lichtenauer tradition does that, nor does Agrippa or Carranza do so. Of course, you can use the plays of I.33 or the 'Stücke' of the Lichtenauer tradition fight books as if they were drills. You could do the same with Agrippa's examplary demonstrations of the validity of his principles. But it's not really what they are intended for. To conclude, no one claimed >that all of "how to stab literature" shifts

[@roninrusso872]

No offense to you, sir. But you spend more time talking than actually doing the art itself. You had some good information but It got boring