Wiktenauer needs your help! (Not your money, your actual help.)
“BACKGROUND
I've put quite a lot of effort over the past ten years into assembling the clearest, cleanest, highest-resolution scans of our fencing manuals that I could find. This approach has characterized a lot of our work on the research side of HEMA—finding or fabricating clean, attractive scans, and transcribing and translating them to be as accessible to modern readers as possible. This work is important, but far from the only way that we can learn from the treatises.
In one sense, a treatise is an abstract entity, a collection of ideas divorced from any particular copy of it. But each individual copy of that text is a concrete, very real object, a *book*, which was owned by *people* and hopefully used by some of those owners for learning or teaching. And it is books *as* books that we are going to talk about today.
Manuscripts, of course, are generally unique works of art, either commissioned by a specific buyer, or created first and then customized and completed to the buyer's desires. The history of printed books begins with similar expectations—moveable type was viewed as a labor-saving device for scribes, and the same level of artistic embellishment that went into manuscripts was applied to books after the initial printing.
The 16th century ushered in the age of cheap, uniform texts sold as-printed, but the desire to make a book one's own continued long after. The way readers customized and used (and even defaced) their books is a fledgling field of study that has only begun to be recognized in academia in the past couple decades.
The first printed fighting manual seems to have been De Dignoscendis Hominibus by Pedro Monte, printed in 1492. There is one other possible 15th century treatise (the Landshutter Ringuch), and then about three dozen in the 16th century. We are familiar with the text of these earliest printed fencing manuals, but we know much less about the context that they existed in and the people who bought and used them.
If these books were purchased by fencers, as some of them must have been, then all manner of treasure might have been scribbled into them. For example, in Göttingen there is a copy of Hans Wilhelm Schoeffer's 1620 rapier treatise which also contains a massive hand-written treatise on fencing against left-handers, starting on the book's 23 blank leaves and continuing onto 22 extras that were bound into it—an 88-page manuscript fencing manual hidden inside a 900-page printed book.
The knowledge that may be lurking in the margins and blank pages of copies of 15th-16th century fencing manuals has been on my mind a lot in the past year. Our early manuscripts have a tragic lack of substantial additions by later owners, as people who have attended my lectures recently have heard me lament. But most printed fencing books from this period have never been systematically examined.
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PROJECT
Roger Norling stated in a lecture he gave at Meyer Symposium this year that one of the tasks the MFFG should take on is cataloging every surviving copy of Meyer's work. Afterward, he and I discussed some of what's stated above, and agreed that finding even one extensively-annotated copy of Meyer would be a major game-changer.
So, STEP 1: Find all the Meyers
What we've done so far:
- Sarah Barsness shared with us a spreadsheet she'd been working on for some time, in which she took all of the entries in Worldcat and winnowed them down to actual, physical copies (eliminating more than half of the results). - Several members and friends of the guild helped her expand the catalog to include copies that we knew of outside of Worldcat. - Additional copies were discovered in Thimm's fencing bibliography and the Universal Short Title Catalogue, which were added to the list after being verified in the catalogs of their respective institutions.
Master list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TSFg3VQVWrVWYZPwLV_AniN5JjLPngCy37RBZLO0v6o/edit?fbclid=IwAR0J7FHi-qswPCRLE6eVdWTOkiEt3L9wYKoqItgrx79EgEbRTQcyM2aZtII#gid=0
STEP 2: Examine all the Meyers
What we've done so far:
- We've looked through all of the copies on Sara's list that have digital scans available, searching for use marks. - London Darce photographed use marks in the copy in Austin, TX. - I ordered scans of the copy in Olomouc, Czech Republic, whose catalog entry indicates that it has an extra page of "fencing rules" (šermířské regule). - Volunteers from local clubs have agreed to try to gain access to the copies in New York City, Washington DC, and London, to examine them in person.
STEP 3: Write up all of our findings
When we've exhausted all leads and feel that we have enough material to draw some conclusions and lessons from, Roger and I (and probably others) will publish the results (and all of the raw materials) for everyone to study and learn from. The format will depend on how much we find, but anything from an article on HROARR to a paper in Acta Periodica Duellatorum is possible.
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HOW YOU CAN HELP
STEP 1: Find all the Meyers
Copies of Meyer have ended up in many unexpected places. There's one in the New York Public Library. There's one at the University of Texas - Austin. There might be one in your backyard. We've gone through Worldcat, but only 72,000 libraries subscribe to Worldcat, and not all of them have put their special collections catalogs online.
Check the catalogs of public libraries and university libraries in your area. Even your state or national libraries, if you have them. A small group of us simply cannot check every library in the world, but if enough HEMAists get involved, we could take a big bite out of the problem.
Meyer was published in 1570 and 1600, and there are historical references to printings in 1610 and 1660 that we've never found confirmation for; any of these might be in your library. Search for "Joachim Meyer" and "Meyer, Joachim" around those dates. Search for keywords like "fechten" and "fechter" (which often also turns up other gems). If the library catalog is not digitized, you may have to email a librarian or even go in person.
Do you have connections to people with private collections of rare books? Ask them too!
And if you find a Meyer not on the list, let us know!
(If you're feeling very ambitious, we'd also be interested to know about copies of Andre Paurnfeindt, Christian Egenolff, and Fabian von Auerswald; if this goes well, that will probably be the subject of a similar project.)
STEP 2: Examine all the Meyers
If you live in one of the cities on the list, then find out if you can access the special collections of the institution that owns the book. Maybe even see if you can go with other interested members of your club, to give everyone a taste of history (and also to avoid overwhelming the library with requests).
If you can get access to the book, go through it carefully. Take pictures of any writing in the book you can find, even if it's just an owner's mark. Write down places with underlining or circles. If the artwork has been colored, that's also useful to know. (If they don't allow photography, note down any pages with writing so that we can order official scans of them.)
If they won't let you view the book, and you don't know anyone who can, then at least try to open a conversation with a research librarian at the institution. They are often willing to go flip through books on behalf of patrons, and might even already have the information you need in a file.
If you have the skills, volunteer to transcribe or translate the pages with writing that we find. There are already a few pages of notes that need to be processed, and hopefully there will be many more!
STEP 3: Write up all of our findings
We'll know more about how you can help with this step when steps 1-2 have proceeded further.
CONCLUSION
We've already found some interesting things just be checking the low-hanging fruit. See the gallery below for examples. With your help, we'll find much more.
Thanks!”
P.S. Happy pride to all!
