The intellectualisation and categorisation of early modern fencing.

This paper traces the changes to the intellectual classification of fencing. The authors of fencing treatises attempted to shift the perception of fencing from its long held violent connotations and towards a more elevated and legitimate practice. This change was prompted by multiple factors, key amongst them were the proliferation of print, the rise of the duel, and courtesy books, such as Castiglione’s <italic>Book of the Courtier</italic>. These factors allowed fencing to be reconceived with new methods and to reach a wider audience. However, to appeal to a larger and increasingly educated audience, early modern fencing treatises adopted new pedagogical tools and made efforts to legitimise fencing, elevating their new methods above fencing’s violent nature. To achieve this elevation, authors of fencing treatises attempted to raise fencing’s intellectual standing through the application of the trivium and later geometry and humanistic learning, in order to reposition fencing as a practice worthy of gentlemanly study. In this paper, I outline the process of this change and argue that, despite concerted effort to intellectualise fencing, as a means to obtain legitimacy, attempts were never wholly successful, due to an inability to completely separate conceptions of violence from the new science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]