Martial arts manual

Martial arts manuals are instructions, with or without illustrations, detailing specific techniques of martial arts.

Prose descriptions of martial arts techniques appear late within the history of literature, due to the inherent difficulties of describing a technique rather than just demonstrating it.

The earliest extant manual on armed combat (as opposed to unarmed wrestling) is the I.33, written in Franconia around AD 1300.

Not within the scope of this article are books on military strategy such as Sun Tzu's The Art of War (6th c. BC) or Vegetius' De Re Militari (4th c. AD), or military technology, such as De Rebus Bellicis (4th to 5th c.).

Contents

Predecessors

Some early testimonies of historical martial arts consist of series of images only. The earliest example is a fresco in tomb 15 at Beni Hasan, showing illustrations of wrestling techniques dating to ca. 2000 BC. Similar depictions of wrestling techniques are found on Attic vases dating to Classical Greece.

The only known instance of a manual from Western antiquity is P.Oxy. III 466 (2nd century), detailing Greek wrestling techniques. There are some examples in classical Chinese literature that may predate the turn of the Common Era: the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian (ca. 100 BC) documents wrestling, referring to earlier how-to manuals" of the Former Han (2nd century BC) which have however not survived. An extant Chinese text on wrestling is "Six Chapters of Hand Fighting" included in the 1st century AD Book of Han.[1]

All other extant manuals date to the Middle Ages or later. The "combat stele" at Shaolin Monastery dates to AD 728. The earliest text detailing Indian martial arts is the Agni Purana (c. 8th century), which contains several chapters giving descriptions and instructions on fighting techniques.[2][3] It described how to improve a warrior's individual prowess and kill enemies using various methods in warfare whether they went to war in chariots, horses, elephants or on foot. Foot methods were subdivided into armed combat and unarmed combat.[4] The former included the bow and arrow, the sword, spear, noose, armour, iron dart, club, battle axe, chakram and trident.[5] The latter included wrestling, knee strikes, punching and kicking methods.[4] An old Indian "martial arts manual" is a list of wrestling techniques contained in the Malla Purana, 13th century Gujarat.

The oldest extant European martial arts manual is MS I.33 (ca. 1300).

"Illustrations only" manuals do not become extinct with the appearance of prose instructions, but rather exist alongside these, e.g. in the form of the Late Medieval German Bilderhandschriften.

Historical European martial arts

German Fechtbücher

Further information: German school of fencing

Fechtbuch (plural Fechtbücher) is Early Modern High German for "combat manual" (literally "fightbook"),[6] one of the manuscripts or printed books of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance containing descriptions of a martial art. Usually, the term is taken to include 15th and 16th century German manuals, but the nature of the subject matter does not allow a clear separation of these from treatises from other parts of Europe on one hand (particularly from the Italian and French schools), and from manuals of later centuries on the other hand.

A list of Fechtbücher include:

Italian treatises

The Italian school is attested in an early manual of 1410, at which time it is not yet clearly separable from the German school. Indeed, the author Fiore dei Liberi states that he has learned much of his art from one "Master Johannes of Swabia". The heyday of the Italian school comes in the 16th century, with the Dardi school.

French manuals

Similar to the situation in Italy, there is one early manual (ca. 1400, dealing with the poleaxe exclusively, and later treatises set in only after a gap of more than a century.

English manuals

Apart from three rather opaque texts of the later 15th century,[13] the native English tradition of fencing manuals begins with George Silver's Paradoxes of Defense (1599).

Spanish and Portuguese manuals

There are some manuals containing training advice for the medieval tournament and jousting such as the early Portuguese work A ensinança de bem cavalgar em toda a sela by Edward of Portugal (1391–1438). A riding instruction manual that also included martial information.

17th century Spanish Destreza is very much steeped in the Spanish Baroque noblemen mindset, so doesn't contain much graphical explanations of the fencing techniques so much as hard to understand explanations based on mathematics and philosophical sciences in general. The subsequent difficulty on interpreting the theory and practice of Destreza correctly has lead many times to this school of fencing being misunderstood.

Historical Asian martial arts

Further information: History of Asian martial arts

The oldest known martial arts manual from Asia is contained in the Indian Malla Purana (13th century), which includes portions dealing with wrestling techniques.

The Chinese Ji Xiao Xin Shu dates to the 1560s. The Art of War by Sun Tzu dates to (206 BCE) The Korean Muyejebo dates to 1598, the Muyedobotongji dates to 1790. The Japanese Book of Five Rings dates to 1645.

Notes

  1. ^ Henning, Stanley E. (Fall 1999). "Academia Encounters the Chinese Martial arts". China Review International 6 (2): 319–332. [1]
  2. ^ Zarrilli, Phillip B. (1992). "To Heal and/or To Harm: The Vital Spots (Marmmam/Varmam) in Two South Indian Martial Traditions Part I: Focus on Kerala's Kalarippayattu". Journal of Asian Martial Arts 1 (1). http://www.spa.ex.ac.uk/drama/staff/kalari/healharm.html. 
  3. ^ P. C. Chakravarti (1972). The art of warfare in ancient India. Delhi.
  4. ^ a b J. R. Svinth (2002). A Chronological History of the Martial Arts and Combative Sports. Electronic Journals of Martial Arts and Sciences.
  5. ^ Zarrilli, Phillip B. A South Indian Martial Art and the Yoga and Ayurvedic Paradigms. University of Wisconsin–Madison.
  6. ^ fechten is cognate to English fight and still meant "fight, combat" in general in Early Modern times; in contemporary Standard German, fechten translates to "fencing", while the noun Gefecht retains the generic meaning of "fight, battle".
  7. ^ http://www.pragmatische-schriftlichkeit.de/cgm582.html
  8. ^ http://www.thearma.org/Manuals/Mertin_Siber/MS-Web.htm
  9. ^ http://www.ubs.sbg.ac.at/sosa/webseite/fechtbuch.htm
  10. ^ http://www.thearma.org/Manuals/Goliath/Goliath.htm
  11. ^ http://www.thearma.org/essays/guelf.htm
  12. ^ http://www.achillemarozzo.it/it/trattati/anonimo_bolognese.htm
  13. ^ http://www.mymartialheritage.org/manuals.html 15th Century English Combat Manuscripts online
  14. ^ http://www.thearma.org/Manuals/MS39564/MS39564.htm
  15. ^ http://www.thearma.org/Manuals/Harleian.htm
  16. ^ http://www.thearma.org/Manuals/swetnam.htm

See also

External links