Georges Dubois - forgotten HEMA pioneer

[admin]

http://freelanceacademypress.wordpress. ... -ancienne/

[Bulot]

Would studying Dubois work be called HEHEMA ?

[Phil C]

I have 9/10s of a translation of "Comment se Defendre" waiting to be edited, once I get the next Andre book proofed and published.

It's a fascinating read and is the only Western text I know that advocates carrying a cheap tanto ("une petite sabre Japonaise")for defence (though an umbrella is better, apparently) among many other odd and wonderful suggestions he makes for personal safety (barb-wire boobytraps, kitchen knives wrapped in newspaper &c).

[Andrew Shultz]

I have 9/10s of a translation of "Comment se Defendre" waiting to be edited, once I get the next Andre book proofed and published.

It's a fascinating read and is the only Western text I know that advocates carrying a cheap tanto ("une petite sabre Japonaise")for defence (though an umbrella is better, apparently) among many other odd and wonderful suggestions he makes for personal safety (barb-wire boobytraps, kitchen knives wrapped in newspaper &c).

So this guy was the spiritual ancestor of "Street Sword"?

[Phil C]

..and part Mr Miyagi. His "Duel in 24 hours method" actually has a move he describes as "paint the fence"!

[Thearos]

Comment se défendre is, of course, on this site.

I don't think he means a tanto-- from the description of hacking at the burglar, I think he means a wakizashi, and not for street use, but home defence.

[Mink]

For those interested we are having a discussion of Dubois' foil & dagger text and its relation to the ongoing debate about HEMA vs Sport fencing.

In my opinion, seeing this text, Dubois was surely an HEMA precursor (he had interest in the sources) but not an HEMA pioneer (because he was not really doing HEMA, i.e. researching the historical ways to use the historical weapons).

Regards,

[admin]

Very interesting, thanks for the clarification. In a way I would say the same of Hutton and Castle - they both seem to have looked at the historical techniques with a view to fitting them into their Victorian sense of what fencing should be. Having said that, Hutton did take it make the other direction as well, using lessons from Silver and Marozzo applied to weapons of his time, such as the bayonet (used as a knife - Cold Steel, 1889) and the officer's sword (used against Afghans - The Swordsman, 1897).

[Motley]

... In a way I would say the same of Hutton and Castle - they both seem to have looked at the historical techniques with a view to fitting them into their Victorian sense of what fencing should be. ...

In many ways you could say the same of many modern practitioners who "look at the historical techniques with a view to fitting them into their sense of what fightin' should be"

[admin]

You could, but it is a fairly superficial comparison, because we are held up to mutual academic scrutiny by a fairly large community of interested people. Hutton and Castle were not. Hutton could say "Marozzo does X" and there wasn't really anybody to say "Umm, no he didn't".

[Phil C]

There was also a certain amount of politics involved in the era as French masters attempted to counter the huge interest in Eastern Arts that was happening at the time, or at least ride the wave of interest generated.

Andre's second book (translation due for publishing soon...) is basically him saying that the new Japanese wrestling (Jiujitsu) is nothing that Western wrestlers didn't know and use effectively already but with a few extra flashy tricks added in and a slightly more extreme way of conditioning the body, along with more handsome "champions" capturing the media and limelight, to the extent that Regnier changed his name in to Re-Nie in order to get any attention.

Dubois got trounced in a championship match trying to prove this, and adds his notes to the end of Andre's book saying how and why he did, but also by what means a French-boxer may trounce them back now he has had time to reflect on their method.

It reads very much like Fish and Chip shops complaining about the arrival of Macdonalds in the late 70s.

[Mink]

What I actually wonder is to what degree he understood the texts of the sources. I know he must have been able to read Thibault's text, but I wonder if he used just the images of the Italians or if he had a translation or spoke enough Italian.

Regards,

[admin]

Well, Egerton Castle was supposedly a leading expert of his time, but his understanding of historical systems seems to have been very limited. Both he and Hutton seem to have cherry-picked bits they liked and made them look like how they thought they should look. I don't think that the Victorian/Edwardian HEMA interpretations were up to much from what I have seen, but maybe time will change my opinion.

[Tony Wolf]

The Freelancer blog article on Dubois is substantially based on my book "Ancient Swordplay: the revival of Elizabethan Fencing in Victorian London", which is published by the Freelance Academy Press: http://www.freelanceacademypress.com/an ... dplay.aspx .

Although it's become common in modern HEMA circles to consider Hutton and Castle as if they were a single unit, they actually had markedly different perspectives on historical fencing, which changed over the courses of their lives. For example, Castle's dismissive statements on longsword fencing in "Schools and Masters of Fence" have typically been taken as his definitive comments on that subject, when in fact he was only 26 years old when he wrote "Schools and Masters". He later changed his mind, once he had seen evidence of the more advanced science of longsword play in Paurnfeidt's fechtbuch, and (I suspect) also due to the influence of his colleague Alfred Hutton.

Most significantly, though, both Hutton and Castle had specific agendas underlying their presentations of historical fencing to the British public, which were not the same as those underlying the current HEMA revival.

Tony