COLLECTING MARTIAL ART KNOWLEDGE ON PAPER IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY AND CHINA THE EXAMPLES OF PAULUS HECTOR MAIR AND QI JIGUANG AND THEIR READING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Abstract

European fight books form a large corpus of printed and manuscript material from the fourteenth century onwards, and they provide a detailed view of martial arts practices. Equivalent primary sources in Asia are less numerous for the early modern period. Both scholars and martial arts practitioners have shown interest in the rediscovery of European martial arts in the globalized world of the twenty first century. The recent developments about and around European martial arts studies sweep away the notion of Asia as the exclusive cradle of globalized martial culture, as was already challenged by a growing number of scholarly investigations about their myths and origins. This article reviews the interest in European Martial Arts in Asia. It focuses on the fight book of Paulus Hector Mair (1552–56) and on an Asian counterpart, the military treatise of Qi Jiguang. The German fight book proved to be of interest to a Japanese scholar and groups of martial arts practitioners. As such, it echoes recent interest in comparative studies about fight books stemming from Asia, Europe and the Americas, but also points out potential bias.