Histories of the art of war often have a big gap right where the middle ages should be. When we try to understand how people trained for war and personal conflict in the armies of the 30 Years War or the wars of Justinian, we can recognize certain commonalities with today: Drill, marching, strict discipline, techniques of repetition and rote memorization, these are familiar in the boot camp of a modern army or an MMA school. But medieval society was very different, and therefore a lot harder for us to understand. All too often, this means that like the fight-books themselves, the very context of training in the medieval period has been simply ignored.
In the fight books of the Liechtenauer and related traditions, we notice certain stylistic differences between the medieval period and the Early Modern. Before we can really crack the persistent mysteries surrounding just where these manuals and the people who wrote them fit into the societies they came from, we need to understand what war and personal conflict meant in those societies, and how they approached training more generally. Though there is a great deal of continuity, there are also sharp differences between the social structures of the late medieval and Early Modern eras. From 1420 to 1620, more than just fashions had changed in Central Europe - it's about more than poofy pants!
This presentation will attempt to scratch the surface of what precisely made the medieval period so different in it's pedagogy, style, and inherent assumptions related to training. We will explore how the people of late medieval Central Europe prepared themselves collectively for war, and individually for personal conflict. We will show how this preparation differed in many ways from what we think of as military and martial arts training today, and from the Late Classical and Early Modern eras which bookended the medieval period. Finally, we will touch upon how the differences in style in medieval vs. Early Modern fencing manuals reflect deeper pedagogical and philosophical shifts between these time periods and the social fabric that defined them.