#chidester

[theodorableroosevelt]

“We Will Not Describe the Conversation” by Eugenie Carabastas. Directed by Katie Chidester. 2018.

[historicalfightingguide]

IGX 2018 Lecture: Syllabus vs. System: The Method of Johannes Liechtenauer by Michael Chidester

Lecture by Michael Chidester at Iron Gate Exhibition 2018. http://irongateexhibition.com Johannes Liechtenauer, grand master of the oldest known German fenci...

Lecture by Michael Chidester at Iron Gate Exhibition 2018. http://irongateexhibition.com

Johannes Liechtenauer, grand master of the oldest known German fencing tradition, recorded his art in a 358-line poem called the Zettel. To unlock the secrets of this poem, we rely on the writings of his students and associates, as well as later masters in his tradition.

This lecture consists of two parts. The first will explore the different types of fencing manuals that have been preserved and what they contribute to our understanding of Liechtenauer’s tradition, and how they can be used together to construct a comprehensive explanation of Liechtenauer’s techniques. Much of the focus will be on sources that have only become available in the past few years and how they have changed or informed our current understanding.

The second part will take a step back from the raw instructions in those sources and consider what they tell us about the fencing system itself. It will argue that the Zettel and glosses are not intended to describe a system of fencing in a straightforward or comprehensive fashion, but rather contain a syllabus for teaching that system to students. At the same time, clues in the text can lead us toward and understanding of the shape and nature of the system that underlies those teachings and suggest ways in which we can escape the trap of “fencing according to the lessons.”

Michael Chidester has been studying historical European martial arts since 2001. He was a member of the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts until 2006, where he achieved the rank of general Free Scholar, and he acted as the ARMA Provo Study Group Leader from 2007 until its dissolution in 2009. Michael co-founded the True Edge Academy of Swordsmanship in 2009, and until late 2010 was senior instructor at its Provo, Utah branch.

In 2012, Michael was appointed to the newly-established position of Director of the Wiktenauer by the Historical European Martial Arts Alliance general council, formalizing the role of principal designer and editor that he had assumed in early 2010. As Wiktenauer lead, Michael has assembled the most complete catalog of HEMA manuscripts currently available, including such resources as scans, transcriptions, and translations, and is currently laboring to assemble a similar catalog of printed treatises. In 2013, these efforts earned him a HEMA Scholar Award for Best Supporting Researcher.

Michael has lectured on Medieval and Renaissance martial arts at the Historical Swordsmanship Symposium at the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, Life, the Universe, & Everything: the Marion K. “Doc” Smith Symposium at Brigham Young University, and numerous HEMA events including Broken Point, Fechtschule America, Fechtschule New York, the Iron Gate Exhibition of Historical Martial Arts, Longpoint, and thePurpleheart Armoury Open.

In 2010, Michael received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Brigham Young University, with a minor degree in Military Science and additional coursework in Italian and Spanish. He developed a degree of fluency in the latter while living abroad in Mexico between 2002 and 2004. He is a member of the Western Martial Arts Coalition and a Lifetime Member of the HEMA Alliance.”

[tjgreenart-blog]

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. John Keats

#earth #canyon #arkansas #chidester #photography #nature #geology #cool #naturelover

[disgorgedintotalrecall-blog]

David Chidester and Edward Linenthal, eds., American Sacred Space (1995)

  American Sacred Space, edited by David Chidester and Edward Linenthal, is a pioneering collection of essays about an overlooked topic in American religious history. Especially helpful is the editors’ thoughtful opening essay addressing the issue of what is “sacred” and “American” about American sacred space, why it is important for the study of religion, and how they depart from earlier approaches to the subject. The heart of their argument is that spaces are made sacred through human religious practice and cultural labor. Rejecting the “mystical intuitionism” of earlier theorists like Mircea Eliade, Chidester and Linenthal assert that the sacred is not a given or substantive quality in the world before human culture comes to bear on it. “Sacred”—as an adjective, never a noun—is always situational, enacted by a particular group people in a specific historical time and place (6). In this project, they echo J.Z. Smith and certain strands of Gerardus van der Leeuw.

Chidester and Linenthal describe three central modes of the production of sacred space: ritualization, interpretation, and contestation. First, sacred space is ritual space, a site of formalized and repeatable performances. Drawing on Bourdieu, the editors argue that space further comprises part of a habitus, in which occur disciplines, techniques, and gestures of the body. Puritans, for example, were careful custodians of their ritual spaces in the interests of maintaining purity (11). Second, sacred space is produced through a process of interpretation and a discernment of meaning. Cultural values are invested into the space, and the space is made to ventriloquize those meanings. In other words, space plays a central role in the symbolic ordering of the world. Third and finally, “sacred space is inevitably contested space” (15). The processes of ritualization and interpretation are rarely politically neutral; such processes often, whether intentionally or otherwise, stake claims to power. In the nineteenth-century, for example, the sacralization of American spaces was often used to justify conquest and promote nationalism.

The editors go on to describe what is distinctively American about American sacred space. Though they insist that each production of sacred space is particular and must be historicized, they think some generalizations can be made. They name seven: America is characterized by frontier situations of intercultural contact, a litigious spirit which often adjudicates sacrality in the courts, a “distinctive managerial ethos” related to the Christian ethic of stewardship, a drive towards commodification, the effects of the “information revolution” or cyberspace, a nationalistic orientation, and finally, a kind of public enactment of religious attitudes and practices, or civil religion.

All of the authors of the volume engage some of these motifs in one way or another. Robert Michaelsen summarizes Native American engagements with the American legal system in their campaign to reclaim sacred lands. Bron Taylor discusses the beliefs and rituals of pagan environmentalists like Earth First! and analyzes their public debate with Native American activists. Matthew Glass chronicles the cultural contest in the making of Mount Rushmore. Colleen McDannell posits that homeschooling American evangelicals limn a sacred space in the home. In an essay about the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Linenthal considers the bellicose discourse around its construction. Chidester’s contribution surveys the evolution of South African perspectives on America.

Rowland Sherrill offers a dissonant closing essay to the volume. His essay is a nostalgic and romantic lament over the “fragmentation of selfhood” in contemporary America, which in his mind has profaned our collective potential for appreciating sacred space, as well as diminished the possibility for a common identity and a shared sense of meaning. Everywhere in America today, Sherrill asserts, we see reminders of “something gone dreadfully wrong” (327). A recovery is needed of homo religiosus Americanus (331). He ends on a hopeful note, citing American resilience and ingenuity (336). This is a strange closing indeed for a collection that started by disdaining mystical intuitionism, distancing itself from Eliade (who coined the term "homo religiosus"), and declaring its skepticism for all ideological projects.

One thing that I found wanting in Chidester and Linenthal’s otherwise sophisticated opening essay was a discussion of the materiality of spatial environments. Indeed, Chidester and Linenthal, writing in 1995, seem to effortlessly align with the linguistic turn of poststructural analysis, in which everything functions as a sign or symbol, to be read for its "meaning." They write:

As an arena of signs and symbols, a sacred place is not a fixed point in space, but a point of departure for an endless multiplication of meaning. Since a sacred space could signify almost anything, its meaningful contours can become almost infinitely extended through the work of interpretation. In this respect, a sacred space is not defined by spatial limits; it is open to unlimited claims and counter-claims on its significance (18).

In their laudable aim to see sacred space as always made and remade by human actors, against the claims of Eliadians, Chidester and Linenthal have forgotten that humans are always acting within specific material worlds, which set limits and provoke certain kinds of behaviors, as well as provide continual fodder for human creativity. To stake a claim for materiality in this larger discussion of sacred space is one of the goals of my own research.