Well, medieval and Renaissance, but that wouldn't fit in the thread title.
I'm preparing to write the next chapter of my PhD thesis, which will be on grappling arts in medieval and Renaissance Europe. I'm already familiar with the various combat manuals from those eras, which will provide the core of my sources. However, I need to acquire a broader understanding of violence in these periods, so that I can see everything in context. The problem is that I don't have a background in this subject, as I do with the ancient world, and thus don't have the sources at my fingertips.
So, I could do with some source recommendations from people who are more familiar with medieval history. I've emailed one of the university's medieval history professors for advice, but he's not got back to me yet, and I’d like something to start on whilst I’m waiting.
What I'm looking for are descriptions of battles, and accounts of violent crimes etc. - basically anything which involves people brutalising other people. I'm interested in original medieval/Renaissance sources, rather than modern works about the subject. Whilst I will be checking out some secondary sources eventually, I prefer to gain a good grounding in the primary sources first. I don't mind combing through a lot of stuff to find the bits and pieces I need - so feel free to recommend general works (eg. for the ancient Greece chapter I went through loads of epic poems and history texts to pick out the bits I wanted).
The range of material you're asking for is staggering: all the Icelandic and Norse Epics, the Nibelungenlied, the Waltharius, and all the other German epics, the Song of Roland, Beowulf, .... Then if you want historical rather than literary material, you've got the Historia Francorum, the Chronicle of Raul Glaber, the many chronicles of the Crusades, Froissart, .... The list is truly endless. Then we could go to the Renaissance and check out for example the education treatises which discuss among other things fencing, gymnastics and wrestling as part of the phys ed curriculum. I think you're going to need to decide what you want to include and what you don't before you try to go much farther in this.
Yeah, I appreciate that there's going to be a lot of stuff, and most of what I read won't end up making it into the chapter anyway. I just want to get as much background knowledge as possible. Obviously a few months reading isn't going to put me on the same level as a proper medieval scholar, but I'd like to have as large an understanding as possible before I put pen to paper (well, fingers to keyboard).
I just got an email from Joseph Svinth, in response to one I sent to ARMA (essentially asking what I asked above). He's provided me with a number of useful leads which I'll start with.
Glenn-
You're a Renaissance guy, right? Do you happen to know of any good collections of legal documents which might include descriptions of violent crime? For example, we have surviving legal speeches from ancient authors/orators like Demosthenes, which were useful when examining street violence in Classical Athens. Are there sources like this for the Renaissance which are widely available?
I don't know any off the top of my head, but I'll see what I can find. I would suggest (if you can find it in English) that you check out a period novel (for lack of a better word) that is a fictionalized account of a peasant drawn into an army during the 30 Years War. I want to say the character's name is something like Simplicius, though that's what Galileo used in his dialogue. Again, I'll find the proper title and author for that one later. It gets pretty graphic.
TFS has a reference somewhere to the amount of head injuries cause by quarterstaffs in Renaissance england.
One account I can think of is the murder of Thomas Beckett, Archbishop of Canturbury in 1170 by four English knights. The account is pretty brutal, they hacked him to death with their swords, cuttting open his skull and scattered his brain on the pavement. They did all of this in a church.
How about some of Valed the impaler's antics? His forms of punishment were largely adapted from the Turks.
There is also the story of what happed to Marco Antonio Bragadino, the governor of Cyprus, when the Turks invaded in 1570. They cut off his nose and ears, had him skinned alive in front of a large Turkish audience and then stuffed his skin with straw and paraded it around on the back of a cow.
There is certainly no shortage of people brutalizing each other throughout history. TFS should have some good ones.
TFS has a reference somewhere to the amount of head injuries cause by quarterstaffs in Renaissance england.
That would definitely be useful.
One account I can think of is the murder of Thomas Beckett, Archbishop of Canturbury in 1170 by four English knights. The account is pretty brutal, they hacked him to death with their swords, cuttting open his skull and scattered his brain on the pavement. They did all of this in a church.
Yeah, I remember learning about that at school. I do indeed recall it being spectacularly bloody.
The accounts of torture and punishment are certainly interesting, but I'm looking for more combative violence - something which I could use to establish what role grappling might have been able to play (even if no grappling was actually used in those specific situations).
"TFS has a reference somewhere to the amount of head injuries cause by quarterstaffs in Renaissance england."
Yeah, I remember reading this -- was it in Amberger's book, or possibly Renassance Martial Arts?
I remember the statistics being taken from period crime reports, and I also remember that quarterstaves were the weapon of choice in something like half of all homicides in medieval England...