logical evidence it is clear that their blades and the skills for employing
them were not haphazard, ad hoc, or simplistic. Renaissance fencing styles
must be considered within their own historical contexts. Later manners of
fence developed out of them but one should not speak of them as evolv-
ing—as if Western swordsmanship were some linear progression toward an
ideal form. Instead, changes in civilian European swords and their systems
of use have always resulted from a process of adaptation and change. Fenc-
ing instructors of later centuries did not build upon or extend the skills of
earlier centuries in an “evolution” of knowledge so much as continually
discard, reject, refine, and innovate methods to meet contemporary condi-
tions and circumstances.Contemporary Status
Due to historical and social forces, the teachings and skills of the Renais-
sance Masters of Defence fell out of common use, and no actual traditional
schools of their instruction survive. Only a fraction of their extensive mar-
tial knowledge remains in the refined sport of modern fencing. Renaissance
fighting arts in general and swordsmanship in particular, whether of the
cut-and-thrust form or using the true rapier, cannot be practiced from the
limited nonmartial perspective of a modern sporting game or nineteenth-
century upper-class duel. Modern fencing itself owes far more to the later
small-sword style of the early 1700s than to anything that came before it.
Though the essential physical mechanics of its techniques follow from the
earlier rapier and the small-sword, much of modern sport fencing’s for-
malities and etiquette arose in the 1800s and were not fully established un-
til the turn of this century.
While the methods, ideas, and concepts of the rapier’s civilian thrust-
ing swordplay were to form the foundation for the later gentlemanly style
of small-sword play, such a poised, aristocratic context bore little resem-
blance to the back-alley ambushes of the urban rapier. The instructors of
later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century small-sword schools were in a
sense heirs to the rapier Masters of Defence, but they practiced in a very
different world and under very different social and martial circumstances.
Accordingly, even though the physical mechanics and tactical elements of
both rapiers and small-sword fighting are closely related, they differ in sig-
nificant ways. To equate the gentlemanly duels of honor and courtly repu-
tation and aristocratic life to the encounters of Renaissance street corner
and footpath is misleading. To suggest similarities between rapier fighting
and modern sport fencing is even less accurate.
The Victorian-era bias featured in so much literature of heavy, cum-
bersome chopping blades slowly evolving into the refined, featherweight,
slender small-sword is inaccurate. In the “scientific” approach to the game,586 Swordsmanship, European Renaissance