Scholastic clues in two fencing manuals : Bridging the gap between medieval and renaissance cultures

Leblanc, Hélène [UCL] Cinato, Franck [CNRS – UMR HTL, Paris Diderot]

The Liber de Arte Dimicatoria (Leeds, Royal Armouries FECHT 1, previously and better known as MS I.33), namely the first known fencing manual, dating back to the early 14th century, and the main part of the corpus undergoing a remarkable expansion during the 15th and 16th centuries, seem sharply separated. While the former clearly demonstrates to be related to a scholastic background, the latter is mainly considered within a 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, among which Heinrich von Gunterrodt’s Sciomachia et Hoplomachia: sive de Veris Principiis Artis Dimicatoriae (1579), 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 manuals of combat are not deprived from references to scholasticism and to better qualify 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 would gain to be put within the context of a Scholasticism that is still vivid during the period at stake.