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Book and Sword

~ Pontifex minimus

Book and Sword

Category Archives: Modern

Posts on events in the last few hundred years

Essentialism, Identities, and History

27 Saturday Feb 2021

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

methodology, modern, not an expert, pretendians, problems with identity, pterry

“Idiot! All you have to do is stop wearing that silly robe and get rid of that daft hat and no one will even know you’re a wizard! … Just get rid of them. It’s easy enough, isn’t it? Just drop them somewhere and then you could be a, a, well, whatever. Something that isn’t a wizard.” …

Rincewind nodded gloomily. “I don’t think you understand. A wizard isn’t what you do, it’s what you are. If I wasn’t a wizard, I wouldn’t be anything.” He took off his hat and twiddled nervously with the loose star on its point, causing a few more cheap sequins to part company.

Terry Pratchet, Sourcery (Corgi Books: London, 1988) pp. 147-148 the first visit to the tower of sourcery

A Haida filmmaker is pushing for new legislation in Canada to penalize people who pretend to be Indigenous in order to access grants, awards and jobs intended for Indigenous people. Tamara Bell said she wants those who misrepresent their identity to face fines and even prison time.

Angela Sterritt, “Indigenous filmmaker wants fines, jail time for ‘pretendians’ who misrepresent their identity” CBC News, 2021-Jan-19 (link)

If you follow the news or corporate social media, you will see how often the gap between identities as internal self-belief and identities as external attributes leads to conflict. Most people are reluctant to explain what is at issue or how the word “identity” is used in different ways, and they are even more reluctant to talk about why we started talking about the first kind of identity. I am not an intellectual historian, but as a military historian I will tell the bloody story as well as I can. This is a tale of genocide and oppression and the cycles between different ways of thinking about complicated areas of life.

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The Battle for the Future of the Study of the Ancient World is Bigger than Classics

09 Tuesday Feb 2021

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ancient, Ancient World Studies, methodology, modern

A few years ago I drafted a post about two different approaches to the study of the ancient world. I put it aside but then my mother, Stefano Costa, and Dimitri Nakassis started to talk about a recent New York Times piece on Dan-el Padilla Peralta and his argument that “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity, the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.” I think it is time to pull those ideas out and give my perspective as an ancient historian and orientalist who is not American or British.

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Identities Are Hard to Get At

06 Saturday Feb 2021

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

archaeology, methodology, not an expert, problems with identity, sociology

Some stranded seaweed on a Salish Sea beach at about 1/3 of full tide

A few weeks ago, I talked about how an identity is something to which someone says “I am that.” After a series of unfortunate events between 1914 and 1948, educated people stopped talking about race, gender, and ethnicity as essences and started to talk about them as identities or social categories. This change was meant to reduce the amount of murder, enslavement, and forced migration in our world. But when we try to understand the ancient world, identities in the proper sense are not very helpful.

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The Poster Child for the Western Way of War

30 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

ancient, modern, Second World War, Western Way of War

Two smiling women sitting in a wooded setting with bolt-action rifles, a man in a suit stands in the background
A rare moment of joy a terrible war from The Five Men of Velish (Velizh near Smolensk) https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060022181 Why do WWoW theorists want you to know that partisans and insurgencies and hit and run are not western?

If you know the ancient writers, you must be puzzled why moderns often pronounce that ancient Greek armies were highly skilled and rigorously disciplined. Those writers make it clear that getting high-status Greek men to accept any kind of training and discipline was like getting them to pick a day to have a tooth pulled. Spartans accepted commands and corporal punishment and did a bit of drill, but no ancient writer describes them practising marching or fighting in peacetime. One reason why people say things which are contradicted by so many ancient texts is that they are using the ancient Greeks as an excuse to talk about their own culture, so they project things they love or fear about their own culture on the ancients.

Have a look at this quote from Professor Emeritus, Colonel (retired), Dr. Jonathan House who is talking about how the proud professionals of the German army got themselves spanked by the Red Army.

Germany, in fact, is the poster child for what we like to call the Western Way of War, the idea that a well-trained force can achieve rapid offensive decisive victory by superior discipline, manoeuvre, and equipment. Well, that works part of the time, but if you encounter somebody who is not willing to say he’s defeated, as the Soviets were not, and then you encounter somebody who in addition to that has all this vast terrain, then eventually your plan gets thwarted.

Dr. Jonathan House, “How the Red Army Defeated Germany: The Three Alibis,” 2 May 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zinPbUZUHDE 20:00
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New Magazine Articles

27 Wednesday Jan 2021

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

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Tags

ancient, medieval, shameless plug

three issues of Ancient Warfare and Medieval Warfare magazine spread out on a textured linoleum surface

The past year has been what it has been, but I have managed to publish a number of magazine articles on ancient warfare and medieval armour. They have siege engines! Military colonists! Tomb-robbing consuls! Late Babylonia! The ones on battering rams and equipping the king’s men have come out since October.

“The Achaemenid Empire’s Jewish soldiers: Serving the Great King,” Ancient Warfare XIII.5 (2020) pp. 34-37 (for sale from Karwansaray BV)

“The Amathus Bowl, ca. 700 BC: World of mercenaries,” Ancient Warfare XIII.5 (2020) pp. 24-25 (for sale from Karwansaray BV)

“Turning Your Back: The Late Reinvention of Backplates.” Medieval Warfare X.4 (2020) pp. 38-41 (for sale from Karwansaray BV) {backplates which span the whole back reappear in Europe in the 1410s after a thousand years of absence, and were not universal for a century more … why does this important area remain lightly protected?}

“Assyrian Battering Rams: A City-Breaching Buddy System,” Ancient Warfare XIV.3 (2021) pp. 14-19

“Equipping the King’s Men: Documents, Art, and Stories,” Ancient Warfare XIV.4 (2021) pp. 34-39 https://www.karwansaraypublishers.com/ancient-warfare-xiv-4.html {if we combine all types of sources, a distinctive new picture of the armies of Darius and Xerxes emerges}

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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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

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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

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