Mike West wrote: |
Does anyone ever suspect that any manual/master they are studying is a bunch of crock, or at least not as competant as moderns give him credit for? |
Well, the problem is multifaceted. Here are three issues:
1) There are a lot of manuals/treatises out there, and people tend to devote their time to the ones they like. I would not have spent as much time as I have studying Silver if I didn't think his work had, in general, a "ring of truth". Unfortunately,
2) Until you study a manual or master in depth, you are not qualified to judge his work, so whether a source seems good or bad to the novice doesn't mean much. But it gets worse:
3) Even if you do study a manual in depth, you're still not very well qualified to judge the author's style, because he wrote for a different audience and a different context, and the manual is never a full encoding of the source style. For this reason, I'm slowly trying to get away from saying I work with "Silver's style", instead to say I work with "Silver's Brief Instructions style".
So, yes, probably everyone studying these sources has some they trust over others -- but though the people who understand this problem might be willing to name off their favorites, they're going to be very, very hesitant to say one source or another is "a bunch of crock", because they can't prove that.
For what it's worth, having studied Silver for a while now, I do believe that he erred in at least one respect: he overstated his case against the rapier. One of his major complaints against it, the lack of a proper hilt, was easily addressed by the development of more protective rapier guards. Furthermore, when he gives instructions on how to fight against a rapier with a shortsword, he's also indirectly giving instructions on how to fight using the rapier. In at least one particular situation, the rapier would have an advantage. So although I respect Silver's work, I don't take everything he said as absolute truth. It goes back to one of the themes that Bill started this thread with: the need to acknowledge the existence of different styles and preferences and to recognize that "different" doesn't always imply "one is better".
Quote: |
Are moderns so hungry for knowledge of the past that they're willing to accept anything as legit, as long as it survived the centuries? |
I believe that we should give each historical source the benefit of the doubt except insofar as there's clear and convincing evidence not to, or insofar as the sources contradict one another. (Silver vs. rapierists, for example.) When we're discussing how weapons were used "back in the day", empirical accounts from that time are, in general, just a teensy bit more credible than opinions reasoned out by us moderns.