What Dr. Anglo neglects is that fencing is not merely kinetic art. Such concepts as timing, second intention, and other such subtleties are hard to understand, or to recognize in texts, without practical experience. As the author paraphrases Pietro Monte, "lessons will be more readily grasped if there is a master to show how they should be done." A thorough knowledge of intangibles such as these is the main pitfall when attempting to comprehend books on fencing. Even the "pictographs" of I-33, the earliest known manuscript that can be considered a work on fencing, are not so occult to cognoscenti. This is why a knowledge of tradition is also important, so that the pieces of the puzzle have some framework to fall into. (Unfortunately, Anglo also seems to be unfamiliar with Dr. William Gaugler's History of Fencing, which is not listed in his bibliography, and which might have been useful in attempting to grasp these intangibles.)

Additionally, Though Dr. Anglo is critical of Egerton Castle's Victorian-era superiority in Schools and Masters of Fence, which saw all fence as leading up to the "perfection" of contemporary (i.e. nineteenth-century) foil-play, Dr. Anglo himself occasionally lapses into modern editorial when he discovers a construction he does not understand. This is most notable when, like many writers, he seems to have been bewildered by the Spanish school of rapier fencing. Indeed, even his bibliographical information on Carranza-giving 1582 instead of 1569 as his date of publication for De la Philosophía de las Armas-is in error. Even a cursory glance at La Verdadera Destreza will reveal a rationalistic system of fence, intimately tied, as with the rest of the masters considered, to the humanistic pedagogical, intellectual, and aesthetic concerns of its time and place. Dr. Anglo says, "The Spanish masters . . . were anxious to work out a symbolic notation rather than one which relied . . . on a realistic representation of fencers. And the key to this quest was their obsession with the interrelationship between mathematics and sword play."

Indeed, this is so, but not because swordsmen were expected to fence "by the numbers," but rather because geometry and mathematics were believed to develop the facilities of judgment and enable the practitioner to address the problem at hand rationally-intangible qualities of no small use in fencing, but which can not be understood without first-hand knowledge. Static figures do nothing to convey this sense. (We have not mentioned, either, the connection between geometry and conceptions of Platonic forms, which would have been implicitly understood by Carranza's audience.) The Spanish masters differed from their predecessors in that they tried to elucidate a meta-approach to fencing. Whether the system "works" or not is immaterial; what it means is. To his credit, though, Dr. Anglo does produce one of the best discourses on Thibault's Académie de l'espée in recent years, and explores the humanistic idea of fencing along the Vitruvian plan quite well. (Ironically enough, Thibault was derided by Narváez as confusing the issue with complexity, and Narváez is in turn criticized on the same grounds by Anglo.)

The next chapters in Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe are rather straightforward, dealing with the "Myths and realities of foot combat with swords"; "Vocabulary and taxonomy of sword fighting"; "Staff weapons"; "Bare hands daggers, and knives"; "Arms and armour"; "Mounted combat" (both with the lance and other weapons); and "Duels, brawls, and battles." In all, a wealth of information and analysis is expertly introduced and dealt with. When Dr. Anglo deals with the intellectual history of the sword, he cannot be disputed. It is when he offers technical analysis that errors and errata creep into the discourse.