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Book and Sword

~ Pontifex minimus

Book and Sword

Author Archives: Sean Manning

Max Weber vs. Eduard Meyer on Marathon

22 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ancient, Eduard Meyer, Max Weber, Methodenstreit, methodology, modern

For a long time I have been meaning to find the original citations for the great debate between sociologist Max Weber and historian and orientalist Eduard Meyer about the significance of the first two Persian invasions of Attica (the Athenians didn’t like to talk about the third Persian army and fleet which arrived a hundred years later and was welcomed with open arms). Jona Lendering mentioned it in his article on the significance of Marathon but when he was creating his site he was bullied into leaving out citations by teachers who were worried that their students would crib from it. I finally have the passage: Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4th edition (Därmstadt, 1965), Bd. IV.2.3 p. 420 http://www.zeno.org/nid/20002751402 Meyer had just noted that Delos and many other sacred sites in Greece seemed to have a working relationship with the Persian kings by the beginning of the fifth century BCE. I will give the original German and then my translation.

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Sir Charles Oman Almost Understood

16 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Medieval

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

ancient, hoplite controversy, medieval, methodology, Sir Charles Oman

In print and on this blog I have written a lot about how I think the basic debate in the study of Greek warfare from 1989 to 2013 was about whether we should read Greek writers as giving faithful glimpses at a timeless unchanging practice of warfare, or as class and civic partisans whose stories about the good old days were just as wishful as the ones we hear today. People who like to talk about abstract ideas often link the second approach to words like deconstruction and postmodernism and names like Eric Hobsbawm and Jill Lepore. But they were not the only thoughtful people to realize this, and in October I found some similar thinking in an unexpected place.

Back in 1924, Sir Charles Oman revised his history of warfare in Middle Ages after being introduced to the works of Hans Delbrück. Have a look at his new account of the battle on the Marchfeld between Austro-Hungarian and Bohemian forces in 1278, in one of the chapters which he says he specially reworked in response to the German historian.

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Apropos of Nothing

09 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by Sean Manning in Medieval

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

England, medieval, source

Early in the pandemic, British History Online was free to access. And I remember reading an Anglo-Norman proclamation from Edward II or Edward III forbidding anyone whatsoever from bringing any daggers, swords, hatchets, bows and arrows, long knives, aketons, plates, steel caps, or other offensive or defensive arms into sight of the palace at Westminister to disturb the proceedings of Parliament. I wish I could find that again but it was not helpful for the specific topic I was researching.

Edit: see Mart Shearer’s comment below with an English translation of one of these proclamations

2020 Decade-Ender, or, the Isidore Option

31 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

medieval, modern, not an expert, state of the web, year end

a cloudy sky over distant mountains, closer mountains, a small castle in woods, and grassy farmland
The Brenner Pass, Schloss Ambras, and a crossroads downstream from Innsbruck.

So, it is 2020. It has been an odd year in an odd decade. And while I am tempted to just note who was king and the most exciting thing that happened in the heavens, I want to finish this section of my chronicle. The conjunction of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter in May was exciting but there are other things to write.

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Twelve Early European Fencing Manuals

19 Saturday Dec 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Medieval, Modern

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

historical European martial arts, medieval, modern, source

reprints of four early European fencing manuals on an ironing board covered with a colourful cotton print

Today anyone who wants to can download photos of almost all the European fencing manuals written before the 20th century, and often buy a convenient reprint or translation. But this makes it difficult to get a sense of the genre as a whole. Which manuals should someone who is just getting interested in the subject read first? How can we decide which texts our readers or listeners are likely to know, so that when we mention them it helps them understand? The last academic monograph on the subject, Sydney Anglo’s The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (2000) is organized by themes so information on any one manual or tradition is scattered across different chapters.

So this week, I would like to give a short list of books which is representative of European fencing manuals before the middle of the 17th century.
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Some Thoughts on “Fuzzy Nation”

10 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert

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Tags

book review, ethnography, modern, not an expert, science fiction

Fuzzy Nation (by John Scalzi: Tor, 2011) is a fun quick read of a novel, and I hope it inspires more people to read H. Beam Piper. The author has the good taste to blog and to focus on what he loves about old science fiction not on proclaiming that he is morally and intellectually superior. But I found one difference between the original from 1962 and this book from 2011 revealing about cultural change in the past 50 years.

The Terro-Human Future History is a world where the United States ceases to exist early in the First Century Atomic Era, and human civilization is rebuilt in Latin America, South Africa, and Australasia. In the 7th century Atomic Era people think of the United States about as often as we think of the Timurids or Srivijaya, and the racial prejudices of the First Century Pre-Atomic have been dissolved by the result of seven centuries of intermarriage amongst the survivors. Piper had a romantic sympathy for the Confederate States of America, but he loved giving characters names like Themistocles M’Zangwe. Fuzzy Nation is set in a world where people go to Oxford and Duke, come from North Carolina, and allude to Andrew Jackson and Star Wars.

Both writers create imaginary cultures which have a few of their own culture’s quirks (Piper’s cocktail hours and tobacco smoking, Scalzi’s environmental impact statements and universal surveillance). But one writer assumed that not just the United States but the whole European great power system would vanish just like other mega-states and power systems have in the past, and the other made sure that the reader knows that in the far future Duke is still a place to go to law school and Oxford is a very prestigious university. I find that, as Mr. Spock would put it, fascinating. One novel tells readers that the customs of their tribe are not the laws of nature, and another promises that there’ll always be Chicago.

Fuzzy Nation is avaialble on Bookfinder (hardcover edition). If you enjoy my work, please support this site.

Cross-Post: FS Geibig Erscheint

08 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Medieval, Modern

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

arms and armour, cross-post, historical European martial arts, medieval, prehistoric European martial arts

In honour of his retirement from Veste Coburg, a Festschrift for arms-and-armour scholar Alfred Geibig has been published.

Contributions in English and ?German? are by Heiko Berger, Raphael Beuing, Dirk H. Breiding, Heiner Grieb, Heinz Huther, Armin König, Arne J. Koets, Stefan Mäder, Jürg A. Meier, Ingo Petri, Christopher Retsch, Mario Scalini, Tobias Schönauer, Jens Sensfelder, Wilfried Tittmann, Heiko P. Wacker, Roland Warzecha, Herbert H. Westphal, Bob Woosnam-Savage and Joachim Zeune.

Hieb- und stichfest – Waffenkunde und Living History. Festschrift für Alfred Geibig (= Jahrbuch der Coburger Landesstiftung, Bd. 63, 2019), Petersberg 2020, ISBN 978-3-7319-1027-5 (488 Seiten, 29,95 €, erscheint 12/2020)

You can order via email here: sgvcoburg@bsv.bayern.de and read the original German announcement here

What Did the Persians Do For Us?

05 Saturday Dec 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Younger me would have been ever more excited, his David Macaulay books are coming to life! Repairing the piers of the foot bridge downstream from the Hofgarten on the river Inn, Austria in summer 2019.

The Centre for Ancient Cultures in Innsbruck is a glass and steel building full of carefully catalogued books next to a grain field and a car dealership. A block away on one street is a church, a block away along another is a Chinese buffet. Our building and its neighbourhood embody the heritage of the ancient Near East

Most of the crops and animals which fed and clothed Eurasia until the Columbian Exchange were domesticated in the Near East. Many of the trees in our orchards come from the mountains of central Asia through gardens in Iran. Writing has been independently invented at least four times, but it was Near Eastern Semitic-speakers who turned hieroglyphics into the aleph bet gimmel which became our alphabet. And it was people in the fertile crescent in the first centuries CE who turned Near Eastern texts and customs into the largest single family of religions today, and their descendants who kept the Fertile Crescent a place of great religious diversity until the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

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Another Lovecraftian Revelation c/o Dimitri Nakassis

01 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

ancient, ideology, methodology, Mycenean Greece, stereotypes about the east

I grew up thinking that guff about the ancient Greeks being uniquely rational, creative, free, and so on was as dead as Theosophy. The writers who influenced me as a child, like Peter Connolly or L. Sprague de Camp, either ignored it or mocked it, and none of the teachers and books which influenced me at university took it seriously. But I am watching a talk by Dimitri Nakassis on “Orientalism and the Myceneans” and I am coming to a horrid revelation.

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Incurious Black Magic

28 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

media criticism, modern, not an expert

a keep and church atop a hill with cloudy sky in the background

Burg Freundsburg over Schwaz, Tirol.

This fall, I have been thinking about why some communities did not feel right for me. I enjoy learning from different types of experts, from craft workers to retired thugs to academics, but the kind of journalists who write opinion pieces and columns always gave me a bad feeling. I have trouble talking about feelings, but I think I can articulate two reasons why I feel this way.

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  • Max Weber vs. Eduard Meyer on Marathon
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  • Apropos of Nothing
  • 2020 Decade-Ender, or, the Isidore Option
  • Twelve Early European Fencing Manuals

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