Rapier wit.
SEATTLE — The golf cases propped up against the walls are full of swords, daggers and the occasional bit of chain mail. The halls of the community center ring with the clash of steel, the thud of shields and the quick snip-snip of rapiers. The books quoted are as often as not in medieval German or Latin.
Welcome to a Western martial arts conference. Not a cowboy or lariat in sight. Western in this case is Western European, as opposed to the better-known Asian variety.
These are the arts of warfare and self-defense of medieval and renaissance Europe. Also called historical martial arts, they employ bare hands, pikes, a variety of swords, daggers and rapiers in the way that practitioners of Eastern martial arts might use bo staves, Katana swords and Tanto knives.
Unlike in the East, these fighting traditions died out in Europe in the 1600s with the introduction of gunpowder-fueled weapons.
But now they're making a comeback.
"Eastern" martial arts were never supplanated by gun-powder weapons the way it happened in Western Europe. The Japanese, although very happy to use gun powder weapons, made a conscious decision to de-emphasize them (and cut themselves off from the world) which worked pretty well from the 17th century to 1868. This allowed the knowledge to still be there in living memory once people started getting interested in the subject after WWII. China, although a very early adopter of gun-powder weapons, managed to shamble along till nearly the 20th century using a polygot mix of pretty much everything, and again living memory was available to reinvigorate a what was basically a living tradition.
Western Europe for better or worse, went a different route. The immediate spread gun powder weapons starting in the 13th or 14th centuries (The English supposedly had artillery at Crecy) had, by the 1520's made guns the missle weapon of choice. At Cerignola in 1503, at Bicocca in 1522, at Pavia in 1525, men armed with guns shot down their opponents armed only with cold steel. I suppose it is tragically fitting that the Chevalier Bayard died from a arquebus ball. In someways, Chivalry died with him.
But not in others. That quote from Henry V that found the other day has another interesting little marker. "Art thou Officer?" Not knight or gentleman, although certainly that helped, but an officer. It shows how the thinking had changed even by 1600. The nobility of the west walked down a different path.
Certainly, some of the best fencing manuals date from the 16th and 17th century, but that declined over the course of time to where sport fencing was just a faint echo of the past.
The demise of birth based nobility also had something to do with it, and although there was a slight revival of things medieval in the late 19th century, that pretty well got wrecked in the general destruction of WWI. (As I like to point out).
I've noticed the growth of this over the past couple of decades. It is probably, something else in which Gygax and his game was a factor.
(via FARK, believe it or not)
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