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The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe. By Sydney Anglo. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-300-08352-1. Plates. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 384. $45.00.
Sydney Anglo is a well-established authority on jousts and tournaments, Renaissance pageantry, and, more generally, Tudor kingship. In this, his most recent book, he treats the history of the body as an instrument of violent action and justifies his enterprise with the observation that much violence prevailed throughout the Renaissance era, advanced the felt need for physical exercise, and generated a substantive corpus of relevant texts which allow critical inquiries into the use of the body for violent purpose. Anglo insists that what may have been relevant during the Renaissance should also be accepted as relevant in the present and underlines this point by occasional digressions on fighting habits during the two world wars of the twentieth century. He argues that the use of the body for the purpose of conducting violent action displays no principal difference whether the violence occurs in the context of regular warfare, private duels and brawls, or institutionalized sports competitions. However, even though he regards these activities as innately...