Provenance of MS I.33

[Michael Chidester]

Does anyone have any notes on the provenance of the MS I.33? I'm particularly curious about its whereabouts in the 15th and 16th centuries, since I can think of at least two fencing manuscripts that portray sword and buckler fighters wearing robes and standing in I.33-like positions, but in both cases they are textless. There are also various examples of fencers standing in similar postures without robes, of course, but those are more easily explained away. Does Forgeng talk about this at all in his book (which I've sadly been unable to purchase due to the troubles with Chivalry)?

[Craig Shackleton]

Forgeng does talk about this a little.

First off, the D-hand inscription on the first page rebuking the the authors is attributed to Arneas Silvius/Pope Pius II. Second, Johannes Herbart von Wurtzburg wrote his name on page 13, and seems to have owned the manuscript in the mid-late 16th century. Forgeng also says that the manuscript is mentioned in Heinrich von Gunterrodt's 1579 pamphlet De veris principiis artis dimicatorie. The short story is that von Wurtzburg showed him the manuscript. von Wurzburg apparently found it in a Franconian monastery when he was a soldier.

I am 100% convinced that the sword and buckler plays in CGM 3712 are related to the I.33 manuscript, although they appear to be additional plays or extensions of the material. I'm assuming that this is one of the manuscripts you are referring to. There are two stylistically different sections on sword and buckler in that manuscript. One has robed combatants, one with his hood up and the other with his hood down, stylistically similar to I.33 and wearing the same clothes, but with different hairstyles. The other images (which come first in the manual) show similar plays by men in clothes contemporary with CGM 3712. I think that all of the images are based on material related to I.33, but part way through making the new copy, the artist stopped updating the clothing. There are particular details, especially the oversized side-on bucklers that indicate this to me.

Franck Cinato has stated that I.33 is missing pages, but I don't know what his evidence is. If he is correct, then it is probable that the images in CGM 3712 are copied from those pages, since there is so much similarity but no exact overlap with the material in the two manuscripts. My other theory is that the extended material comes from a second book by the same author(s) or additional material intended to be added to I.33. Whatever the case, I believe that the pages were not with the manuscript at the time that CGM 3712 was produced. This date coincides with the approximate time that von Wurtzburg acquired I.33. It may be that the complete manuscript was divided at that point.

What is your second similar source? The Berlin sketchbook has some images with similar plays to CGM 3712, but not in robes, and von Eyb looks a bit similar, but again, no robes. I don't know of another source.

[Michael Chidester]

Interesting information. CGM 3712 is one of the texts I was thinking of, and I was also sad to discover that none of the robed sword and buckler plays are directly drawn from the I.33. The other manuscript I was thinking of is the Codex I.6.2°.4.

http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Br ... .2%C2%B0.4)

[Craig Shackleton]

Wow, never seen that one before! I would definitely link that to CGM 3712, although the fourth image is anomalous. Not only does it not appear in either of the other two sources, the action appears to depict something contrary to the implied tenets of I.33. Still, the robes are right, there's one hood up and one down, the gloves are the correct shape, the bucklers are right. It is clearly derivative. And given that both of these secondary manuscripts show the same particular style of spiked buckler (that isn't in I.33), I'd bet they are both copied from some other source that is copied from the original lost pages.

I want those lost pages very badly.

EDIT: Whoa! In the first image, the scholar looks just like he does in I.33, goofy smile as he's being stabbed in the head and everything.

[Michael S]

From what I can tell, the section in Cod.I.6.2°.4 is a copy of CGM 3712, although some of the images in CGM 3712 depicting fencers wearing 'contemporary' clothes appear in CGM 3712 wearing 'anachronistic' clothing - where CGM 3712 shows this, Cod.I.6.2°.4 shows that.
I think that without any captions, we're pretty much limited to just saying 'Huh, that's weird', and although there are also stylistic similarities to I.33, there is also artistic things like this which I think I.33 doesn't do. It'd probably be worth transcribing and translating the one Hutter S&B image with text.
I don't have much else to add really - I made the link a few weeks ago and shoved it up on my blog and asked a few people on facebook, but I haven't had much time to think about it. Magnus H suggested that another explanation might be that the artist was depicting rural fencers, as opposed to urban ones. I'm not too convinced by it, but it is an alternative to the 'copied from a lost fencing book' hypothesis.

[Michael Chidester]

Good to see that I'm not imagining the similarities here, then. Although I'd be even happier to discover that someone had not only noticed them before me, but also ironed out their significance.

It'd probably be worth transcribing and translating the one Hutter S&B image with text.

It's not descriptive text, just an inscription made by a previous owner of the manuscript.

[Michael S]

Fair enough. It's all scribbles to me Still, knowing who owned it and when might help work out the tangled knot of all this stuff. From what I gather:

Jörg Wilhalm Hutter seems to have mostly produced books in 1522/3. CGM 3712 was a compilation text copied together in 1556, perhaps by a freifechter named Sollinger, which contains these sword and buckler plays among older material, including Hutter's.

c. 1545 Jörg Breu the Younger made Cod.I.6.2°.4, which includes some of the same sword and buckler material on folios 14r-15v, for PHM.

So at the moment the reason we believe that the stuff in CGM 3712 came first is because it's surrounded by works by Hutter from the 1520's? Wouldn't a more elegant explanation be that it appeared first in Cod.I.6.2°.4 and was then copied by Sollinger? We know that PHM knew of Sollinger and the illustrations in Cod.I.6.2°.4 are far better than those in CGM 3712, and I get the impression that Sollinger was younger than PHM?

[Michael Chidester]

Franck Cinato has stated that I.33 is missing pages, but I don't know what his evidence is. If he is correct, then it is probable that the images in CGM 3712 are copied from those pages, since there is so much similarity but no exact overlap with the material in the two manuscripts. My other theory is that the extended material comes from a second book by the same author(s) or additional material intended to be added to I.33. Whatever the case, I believe that the pages were not with the manuscript at the time that CGM 3712 was produced. This date coincides with the approximate time that von Wurtzburg acquired I.33. It may be that the complete manuscript was divided at that point.

I've never heard of Frank Cinato, but do you have any way of contacting him and asking for more information about this?

[Michael Chidester]

Jörg Wilhalm Hutter seems to have mostly produced books in 1522/3. CGM 3712 was a compilation text copied together in 1556, perhaps by a freifechter named Sollinger, which contains these sword and buckler plays among older material, including Hutter's.

c. 1545 Jörg Breu the Younger made Cod.I.6.2°.4, which includes some of the same sword and buckler material on folios 14r-15v, for PHM.

So at the moment the reason we believe that the stuff in CGM 3712 came first is because it's surrounded by works by Hutter from the 1520's? Wouldn't a more elegant explanation be that it appeared first in Cod.I.6.2°.4 and was then copied by Sollinger? We know that PHM knew of Sollinger and the illustrations in Cod.I.6.2°.4 are far better than those in CGM 3712, and I get the impression that Sollinger was younger than PHM?

Everything I currently know about Sollinger is on his Wiktenauer page, and it isn't much. I think Kevin Maurer was trying to hunt down some facts about him a few weeks ago, so he might be able to shed some light on this.

[Craig Shackleton]

When I get home today I will try and tabulate the significant similarities between I.33 and the other two works. There are many details that speak loudly of being copied from I.33, the only difference being that the plays are different. Some of the plays are quite clearly follow-ups to techniques from I.33.

It is possible that these images are copies of someone else's extrapolation of the techniques imitating the artistic style of I.33, but these seems more far-fetched than just being copies of missing pages, especially given that there is some physical indication in the original manuscript that there are in fact missing pages.

Also, I'm going to go out on just a little bit of a limb here. There is a further note by Forgeng that in the 17th century one image from I.33 was copied into Cod. Guelf 125.16 Extrav. but the copyist commented that the writing was essentially illegible, although he could make out the words sacerdos and scholaris throughout. The reason that this is important to me is that given that the whole is written in difficult Latin shorthand, I suspect that even by the 16th century (200 years after the book was written!) the writing was probably largely indecipherable, hence the failure to transfer the text along with the images.

Although only four figures in Cod.I.6.2°.4 makes it hard to say anything definitive, the fact that three match CGM 3712 and one does not, and the three that do match actually correspond to modernized images in CGM 3712 (although one is shown both modernized and anachronistically) makes me extremely skeptical of the idea that Cod.I.6.2°.4 was copied from CGM 3712. If anything, Cod.I.6.2°.4 seems to be closer to the source given the more detailed similarities to I.33 (like the scholar's face). Since there are more illustrations in CGM 3712, all of which seem to relate to techniques from I.33, it is also unlikely that it is copied from Cod.I.6.2°.4. Hence my belief that both are copied from the original lost pages or another intermediary copy of the lost pages of I.33.

Coincidentally, I have to run and give a presentation on this very subject to a high school history class.