Review of Winnick & Marsden's Edition of the Paris Fiore
As I've said elsewhere, I believe that book reviews should provide what the reader really needs to know up front, so here it is:
I wanted very much to like this book. The Hatcher and Chidester editions of the Getty and Morgan manuscripts, respectively, are impressive books both as Fiore manuscripts and as works of scholarship. Unfortunately, the Paris manuscript is easily the most frustrating publicly available edition of Fiore, and that trend continues here.
To understand why the Paris manuscript, before translators get involved, is so damn frustrating requires a little bit of explanation. The Getty, the Morgan, and the Pisani Dossi were all at least made by someone familiar with Fiore's system, almost certainly Fiore himself, and by a series of linked artists - fairly well established in Chidester's edition of the Morgan. The Paris manuscript, meanwhile, was made by someone who had no idea what the hell they were looking at, but sure liked the fancy drawings. The other editions have a clear pedagogical progression - either the course of a passage of arms, or the course from basic body mechanics to jousting. In all cases, the other editions all bright-line separate armored and unarmored lessons. Meanwhile, even in my favorite panel of the Getty, the intro to sword in one hand, the Paris manuscript goes from looking like this...
You are cowards and know little of this art. You are all words without any deeds. I challenge you to come at me one after another, if you dare, and even if there are a hundred of you, I will destroy all of you from this powerful guard.
Text:
If a wild one throws a sword, or if
The other would prepare to cut to pieces, still that one would only favor me with the point;
This caution teaches, in order that I would not be ridiculed or alarmed.
As usual, text and images, for ease of access, are courtesy of Wiktenauer unless otherwise specified.
Let's talk about the first piece as a bit of advertising, because after the Segno, it's the best piece of advertising art in the Getty. You do not have to know a word of medieval Italian to get the dynamics of the piece. The Master is relaxed, his weight shifted far back on his left leg, and literally everything about his body language says "come at me, bro." If you can speak medieval Italian or you have a translation, the text supports that. He literally says "come at me... and I will destroy all of you." Meanwhile, the Paris manuscript does not have the same open, dynamic pose, his sword is held awkwardly, and the text does not particularly support the art, nor vice versa.
That last is the biggest problem with the Paris: The messaging is inconsistent and not particularly well-linked, and the man who wrote the Latin verse is awkward in both Latin and sword, and the artist is a more skilled artist than swordsman. Now, we should look at their clothing as well: Fiore is very clear in his introductory material to the Getty that this system is usable both in and out of armor, and here he is discussing sword out of armor. Meanwhile, the Paris manuscript freely mixes armored, unarmored, and partially armored, and also intermingles the zogho largo and zogho stretto plays. It is pretty, but as a teaching text, it is useless. "Pretty, useless; pretty useless" could in fact be my pithy review of the Paris manuscript.
The Paris manuscript is also frustrating in at least one other way - we have no idea of the circumstances of its production. A prominent early scholar of the Flower of Battle claimed Fiore was in Paris about the same time it would have been produced, but there is no supporting documentation for this, no supporting documentation that it was even made in Paris, and also no evidence that a man who had no problem publicly dismissing other swordmasters as quacks would support so bad an interpretation of his work. The dedication and introductory material, if they ever existed, are gone, and instead the Paris begins with the Segno - and it's easily the worst Fiore Segno, busy and crowded and incomplete, much like the Paris manuscript itself.
This is frustrating because knowing the circumstances of its creation would be useful for codicological reasons, and also because the Paris is clearly a work of art. Someone paid good money for this and, in an era when books were expensive and hard to come by, to be honest they got their money's worth. Knowing more about the production of the manuscript would be a legitimate, useful contribution because it would help us understand how Fiore's lessons got from northern Italy to Paris - which brings us to what we do know, and also is a good start for what I dislike about this edition of the Paris.
What we do know is that once upon a time Ken Mondschein went on vacation in Paris. It is a truism in TV archaeology shows that the presenter is a "real-life Indiana Jones," but Dr. Mondschein is both a more interesting guy, and a better scholar, than Dr. Jones; Indiana Jones isn't a swordsman for fun and research purposes. In this particular case, he went in the Bibliotheque National and asked if they had any old sword manuals, and next thing he knew, he was digging through archives to find a mislabeled book that should be a previously unknown Fiore. The full story can be found in Mondschein's article on the subject, "Notes on Bibliotheque Nationale MS Lat. 11269, Florius de Arte Luctandi."
... But you wouldn't know that from Winnick and Marsden. The first, and largest, problem with this edition of the Paris manuscript is that literally every single one of the sources is a Wiktenauer pull. Marsden, in his introduction, references Mondschein's story, but the Mondschein article is not in the bibliography. Even complimentary sources - the art consultant is the same as the man Colin Hatcher brought in for the Getty - aren't referenced directly. This is intensely frustrating to me because Marsden and Winnick put the work in, but didn't quite close the gap by making this one more place to start research, but rather a dead-end book because there's no additional branches to follow.
What do I mean by they put the work in?
Well, that's a two-parter. First, this is the first edition that I have that includes both a translation, and an interpretation. Winnick's translation of the Latin is very good - it is in fact the best translation of Fiore that I have, in that it is extensively footnoted, with explanations of word choice, palimpsests, and potential alternate translations. As the Wiktenauer presentation of the Paris verses shows, the Latin verses are bad. Winnick does the very best he possibly could with this. He makes the verses legible and, unusually for a translation of any kind, shows his work by providing alternate interpretations.
The second part is Marsden's interpretation. As I have said, the Paris manuscript is very bad as a sword teaching text. Marsden instead provides a commentary in parallel with the text, consulting the other manuscripts and showing where the art errors and poor swordsmanship crept in. Marsden is another first-wave HEMA figure and a very competent swordsman who knows his Fiore, and therefore he is able to take the game of telephone back to its original sources. This is on full display.
This makes their failure to include the same sources - the Hatcher and Chidester translations, which they reference by name, and Mondschein's work, which is again referenced by name - in the bibliography feel slapdash. The overall feel of the book lines up with this. The cover, for instance, is meant to call out the Hatcher and Chidester translations, but the interior production values are much lower, with a lower grade of paper. That is not in and of itself bad, but it invites direct comparison, and then it suffers by that comparison.
I don't regret getting this book - I view it as a valuable addition to my Fiore library. However, it is intensely frustrating, because the original material is problematic, and because the scholarship was almost there. For someone who wants to be a Fiore scholar, or who likes the pretty pictures, it's definitely a good addition; for anyone else, who just needs a copy of Fiore, I'd recommend Chidester or Hatcher.
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