Unit 17 · Object and Plan

A fencing manual is a book that records a system of armed combat. In German such a book is called a Fechtbuch, meaning fight book. The oldest known European example is Royal Armouries MS I.33, dated by scholars to around 1300 and held today in Leeds, England.

The manuscript mixes Latin text with painted figures. Most pages show a priest, called sacerdos in the text, and a student, called scholaris. Near the end, a woman named Walpurgis appears in the pictures, which makes the book an early record of a woman shown in armed practice.

The book survives as a single copy. Historians cannot name its author, and its exact place of origin is still debated, though most point to a German-speaking region. That is typical of an artifact: it proves that someone recorded this teaching, but it does not show how widely it was taught.

Fiore dei Liberi was a fencing master from Friuli, in northeastern Italy. Around 1400 he produced a manuscript called Fior di Battaglia, the Flower of Battle. One copy is dedicated to Niccolò III d’Este, the lord of Ferrara, which ties the work to a court patron.

Unlike MS I.33, Fiore’s work survives in more than one copy. One is held by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and another by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. The copies differ in their pictures and text, so scholars compare them line by line.

In his introduction Fiore described learning from many masters and said he had fought several duels. Historians treat such claims as the author’s own account. A patron, a wealthy person who paid for a book, often shaped how an author presented himself on its pages.

Qi Jiguang (1528–1588) was a general of China’s Ming dynasty. In the 1550s and 1560s he fought raiders along China’s southeast coast, whom Ming records called wokou. Around 1560 he wrote the Jixiao Xinshu, often translated as New Book of Effective Discipline.

Most of the book is about training soldiers, organizing units and using weapons. One chapter is about boxing. Qi wrote that boxing did not seem useful for battle, but that it trained the body and built confidence for beginners. The book also covers spears, swords, halberds and the organization of troops.

The chapter names several boxing families known in Qi’s day and pictures a set of postures. Historians value it because it has a firm date and a named author. Many later schools told origin legends, but Qi’s book shows what one army officer actually wrote down in the 1560s.

Miyamoto Musashi was a Japanese swordsman of the early Edo period. Late in life he lived in Kumamoto, on the island of Kyushu. In the 1640s he wrote Go Rin no Sho, the Book of Five Rings, in a cave called Reigandō, according to long tradition. He was born around 1584.

The book has five scrolls, named for Earth, Water, Fire, Wind and the Void. Musashi gave it to his student Terao Magonojō shortly before his death in 1645. The original manuscript does not survive, so modern editions rely on later handwritten copies.

Musashi’s own life is known partly from records and partly from later stories, plays and novels. His famous 1612 duel with Sasaki Kojirō is told mainly in sources written long afterward. Historians separate the scroll he wrote from the legend that grew around him.

The National Sporting Club was a private boxing club in Covent Garden, London. In 1909 it began awarding a belt for British champions. The belt was named for Hugh Lowther, the fifth Earl of Lonsdale, who supported the club. The first winner was the lightweight Freddie Welsh, in 1909.

The belt came with a rule. A champion who won three title fights in the same weight class could keep the belt for good. That rule rewarded boxers who defended a title, not just those who won it once. Welsh was a Welsh boxer whose real name was Frederick Hall Thomas.

The British Boxing Board of Control, formed in 1929, later took over the belt and still awards it. Many Lonsdale Belts now sit in family homes and museum cases. Each belt is a trophy, and like a certificate it records a sanctioning body, a date and a weight.

Sumo in Tokyo moved into a new indoor hall, the Kokugikan in Ryōgoku, in 1909. That year the sport began to recognize one wrestler as the winner of each tournament. The Japanese word for this championship is yūshō. Before 1909, sumo records listed each wrestler’s wins and losses, but no single tournament winner was named.

In 1925 Crown Prince Hirohito, who later became emperor, watched sumo and gave money for a prize. The trophy made from that gift became known as the Emperor's Cup. It is presented to the winner of the top division, called makuuchi, at the end of each grand tournament.

The cup is large and heavy, and winners hold it up for photographs on the last day. It links professional sumo, run today by the Japan Sumo Association, to the imperial family. The object shows how a sport gained status by attaching a national symbol to its prize.

For centuries, fencers practiced with blunted swords and little face protection. Teachers limited attacks to the body because an eye injury could be fatal. That limit shaped how people practiced and how contests were judged. Fencing had long been taught in European cities by licensed masters and guilds.

In the late 1700s, French fencing teachers began using masks of woven wire mesh. Many histories credit the Paris master Texier de La Boëssière with making the mask popular. The mesh let a fencer see and breathe while it stopped a blade from reaching the face.

Masks changed the practice room. With the face protected, fencers could exchange attacks more freely, and the rules of foil fencing developed around that faster play. The mask is a small object that stands for a large change: safety equipment making a new kind of contest possible.

Eadweard Muybridge was an English-born photographer working in the United States. In the 1880s the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia supported his study of movement. He lined up many cameras and triggered them one after another to record a moving body.

In 1887 he published Animal Locomotion, a set of 781 plates. The subjects included horses, birds and people doing everyday tasks. Some plates show men boxing, wrestling and fencing, each broken into a row of still frames. Other plates show runners, jumpers and people climbing stairs.

The plates were made for science, not for sport. Still, they are early photographic records of how athletes of the 1880s dressed and where they stood in a room. A plate in this sense is one printed page of images, and each one was staged for the camera.

Thomas Edison’s company built a film studio in West Orange, New Jersey, in 1893. Workers called it the Black Maria because it was dark and cramped like a police wagon. Its roof opened, and the building turned to follow the sun. It was among the first buildings made only for shooting films.

In September 1894 heavyweight champion James J. Corbett boxed Peter Courtney in the studio. The film was shown in a Kinetoscope, a cabinet with a peephole that one viewer looked into at a time. Each round was shortened so it fit on the film the machine could hold.

The bout was arranged for the camera, and viewers paid to watch each round. That made boxing one of the first subjects sold as moving pictures. Historians see here an early tie between combat sport and film, a tie that later drew the attention of lawmakers.

In 1897 Nevada passed a law allowing prizefights, when most states banned them. On March 17, 1897, James J. Corbett defended his heavyweight title against Bob Fitzsimmons in Carson City. Fitzsimmons won in the fourteenth round. The fight took place on St. Patrick’s Day before a crowd in an outdoor arena.

Promoters filmed the fight with a camera called the Veriscope, which used unusually wide film. The finished picture ran well over an hour, making it one of the longest films made up to that time. It was shown in theaters across the country. Enoch J. Rector led the filming.

Fitzsimmons was born in Cornwall, England, and had boxed in New Zealand and Australia before coming to America. It showed that a filmed bout could reach far more people than a crowd in one arena. A promoter, the business person who organizes a match, now had two products to sell: the fight and its film.

In the 1880s John L. Sullivan of Boston was the most famous boxer in the United States. As heavyweight champion, he chose whom he would fight. He publicly refused to box any Black challenger, a practice later called the color line. He held the title from 1882 to 1892.

Peter Jackson was born in 1861 on St. Croix, then part of the Danish West Indies. He built his career in Australia and was one of the best heavyweights of his time. In 1891 in San Francisco, Jackson fought James J. Corbett for 61 rounds, and the bout was ruled a no contest.

Sullivan never fought Jackson. Because a champion controlled his own title, one man’s refusal could keep a whole group of boxers from a chance at the top prize. The color line in heavyweight boxing held until 1908, when Jack Johnson finally got his title fight. Jackson died in Australia in 1901.

Jack Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1878. By the early 1900s he was one of the best heavyweights in the world, but champions kept refusing him. He followed champion Tommy Burns, a Canadian, across the world to demand a fight. Burns held the title from 1906 to 1908.

On December 26, 1908, Johnson fought Burns in Sydney, Australia. Police stopped the fight in the fourteenth round, and Johnson was named the winner. He became the first Black world heavyweight champion, breaking the color line in boxing’s top division.

Many white newspapers reacted with anger. Writers called for a former champion to return and take the title back. That campaign led to the 1910 fight in Reno, and the phrase Great White Hope came from it. Former champion James J. Jeffries, then retired on his farm in California, became the man they chose.

The Mann Act of 1910 made it a federal crime to transport women across state lines for what the law called immoral purposes. In 1913 a federal jury in Chicago convicted Johnson under this law. His relationships with white women were at the center of the case.

Johnson left the country rather than go to prison. He lost his title to Jess Willard in Havana, Cuba, in 1915. He returned in 1920 and served his sentence in the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. He died in a car crash in 1946. He had been sentenced to one year and a day.

For decades, historians and members of Congress argued that the case was driven by racism. On May 24, 2018, President Donald Trump granted Johnson a posthumous pardon, meaning a pardon given after death. The pardon did not erase the years Johnson lost.

James J. Jeffries had retired as heavyweight champion in 1905 without losing a fight. Under public pressure, he agreed to return and fight Johnson. The bout was first planned for San Francisco, but California’s governor blocked it, so promoter Tex Rickard moved it to Reno, Nevada.

On July 4, 1910, Johnson won in the fifteenth round. News of the result spread by telegraph within minutes. In many cities across the United States, white crowds attacked Black people who celebrated, and people were killed. The fight took place in an outdoor arena built for the day.

The violence showed how a single sporting result could carry the weight of a nation’s racial hierarchy, a ranking of groups by power. Officials who could not reverse the result turned instead to the film of it. A telegraph line had carried the news; the film would carry the pictures.

After Reno, many cities banned showing the Johnson–Jeffries film. In 1912 Congress went further. The Sims Act made it a federal crime to transport films of prizefights between states or into the country. Its sponsors were Southern members of Congress.

The law did not ban boxing and did not ban filming a fight. It banned moving the film. Promoters found ways around it, such as filming in one state and showing the film only there. The law was enforced unevenly. Breaking the law could bring a fine or a prison term.

Congress repealed the Sims Act in 1940. By then Joe Louis, a Black heavyweight champion from Detroit, had held the title since 1937. Historians read the Sims Act as a clear case of federal power used to control what images of a Black champion Americans could see.

Cassius Clay of Louisville, Kentucky, won the Olympic light heavyweight gold medal in Rome in 1960. In 1964 he won the world heavyweight title from Sonny Liston. Soon after, he announced he had joined the Nation of Islam and took the name Muhammad Ali.

During the Vietnam War, the government used the draft to call young men into the military. Ali asked to be classified as a conscientious objector, a person who refuses military service for reasons of religion or conscience. His request was denied. On April 28, 1967, in Houston, he refused to step forward for induction.

Boxing officials acted within days. The New York State Athletic Commission suspended his license, and the World Boxing Association took away his title. In June 1967 a federal jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to five years in prison, though he stayed free while he appealed.

Ali did not box from March 1967 to October 1970, when he fought Jerry Quarry in Atlanta. Georgia had no state boxing commission, so a city license made the bout possible. A New York court later ordered the state to restore his license. Quarry was a leading heavyweight from California.

On June 28, 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Clay v. United States. The justices voted 8–0 to overturn his conviction, with Justice Thurgood Marshall not taking part. The Court found that the government had not properly explained why it denied his claim as a conscientious objector.

Ali lost his first fight after the ban, to Joe Frazier in 1971. He won the heavyweight title back in 1974 against George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire. His case is studied as a refusal that cost an athlete his livelihood and was later upheld by the nation’s highest court.

In 1956 the Althing, Iceland’s parliament, passed a law banning boxing. The law covered public matches and the teaching of the sport. Supporters of the ban pointed to serious injuries in the ring. The country had become a fully independent republic only twelve years earlier, in 1944, after centuries under Danish rule.

The ban lasted more than four decades. In 2002 the Althing voted to allow amateur boxing again. Professional boxing stayed banned in Iceland, so Icelanders who wanted to box for pay had to compete in other countries. That was 46 years after the ban began.

Iceland’s ban shows a nation refusing a sport through ordinary legislation, a law passed by a parliament. It differs from the Sims Act, which blocked only films, and from a champion’s color line, which a single man enforced. It also differs from Ali’s case, where a government punished one boxer rather than the sport.

Sweden had a famous professional champion, Ingemar Johansson, who won the world heavyweight title from Floyd Patterson in 1959. About a decade later, in 1970, Sweden banned professional boxing. Amateur boxing, with its shorter bouts, remained legal.

Norway passed its own ban on professional boxing in 1981. Norwegian boxers who wanted to turn professional had to compete abroad. Supporters of both bans cited medical concerns about repeated blows to the head. Norway’s law also covered other sports in which knockouts were the goal.

Both countries later changed course. Sweden allowed professional boxing again in 2006, under a licensing system. Norway’s parliament allowed professional matches under new rules in 2016. In both cases a state license replaced an outright ban. Sweden’s new law took effect in 2007.

The color line in the heavyweight division fell in 1908 when a Black challenger finally forced a title fight. The Sims Act of 1912 ended by repeal in 1940. Ali’s conviction ended by a Supreme Court ruling in 1971. A different body ended each one: a challenger in the ring, Congress and the Supreme Court.

Nordic bans ended differently. Iceland in 2002, Sweden in 2006 and Norway in 2016 each replaced a ban with rules and oversight, meaning ongoing supervision by an official body. Headgear rules, medical checks and licenses took the place of an outright no.

Historians compare such cases to ask who held power at each moment: a champion, a Congress, a commission, a court or a parliament. The answer changed over time. A regulation, a rule enforced by an official body, was often the compromise. In the 1880s no official body ruled the heavyweight title, but by the 1960s commissions, associations and courts all claimed a say.

Every serious school of martial arts puts safety before skill. Judo’s Kodokan, founded in Tokyo in 1882, has long taught students to fall safely before they learn to throw.

1. Make sure a grown-up knows you are practicing. Clear a space two big steps wide all around, with a dry, flat floor.

2. Warm up for five to eight minutes with moving stretches: jogging, leg swings, hip circles, arm circles.

3. Watch the move in the Dojo. Break it into its steps and practice each step slowly.

4. Add speed only when every step is steady. Stop each move just short of locking the elbow or knee.

5. Cool down afterward with gentle held stretches.

What helps: practice both sides, keep sessions short, and come back to it on a new day. Filming yourself, or watching in a mirror, gives you clear feedback.

Stay safe: solo and into the air, never at a person. Kicks stay at knee or belly height until your balance is steady. Falls only on a mat or soft grass. Stop if something hurts.

A fencing mask in a museum case is evidence of a sport built around one movement: the lunge. Fencing manuals have long taught the same order: the arm extends first, then the legs deliver it.

1. Start in en garde, with a clear lane in front.

2. Extend the front arm straight forward at shoulder height, hand leading.

3. Lift the front toes and kick the front foot forward, heel landing first.

4. Drive off the back leg until it straightens; the back arm drops straight behind for balance. The front knee ends over the front ankle.

5. Recover by pushing back off the front heel and bending the back knee into en garde. Switch sides.

What helps: arm, then foot. The straight back leg works like a spring releasing. Keep the front knee over the ankle, not past the toes.

Stay safe: an empty hand, never a stick or blade. Short lunges at first, on a non-slip floor.

Karate kata and Chinese taolu are forms: fixed orders of moves practiced alone and passed down. The Measured Step form is different in one honest way: it is new, an original eight-move form made for this site, with no claim to an old lineage. That makes it a good test of the course’s question: what makes a form "traditional"?

1. Open the form in the Dojo and watch it all the way through once.

2. Learn it two moves at a time. Watch two, try two, slowly.

3. Join the pairs: moves one to four, then five to eight.

4. Perform all eight slowly, saying each move’s name out loud.

5. Over several days, add smoothness before speed.

What helps: a short daily run-through beats one long session. Writing the eight names down helps you remember the order.

Stay safe: every strike and kick goes into the air, kicks at knee or belly height. Clear a space two big steps wide.