Talk:Johan Liechtnawers Fechtbuch geschriebenn (MS Dresd.C.487)

Work	Author(s)	Source	License
Images
Translation (Bloszfechten)	Keith Farrell	Academy of Historical Arts
Translation (Grappling)	Alex and Almirena	Master Sigmund Ringeck
Transcription	Dierk Hagedorn	Index:Codex Ringeck (MS Dresd.C.487)

Date

Any details on this watermark issue? In the source given [1], Hoffmann says "Anfang 16. Jh.". What is the source of the much more precise range "between 1504 and 1519"? And where are these watermarks? Do they apply to the entire manuscript? --Dieter Bachmann 08:58, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

The dating was discussed in greater detail here in German and here in English.

~ Michael Chidester ^(Contact) 14:19, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. I see you have restored the "between 1504 and 1519". Well, I am certainly not going to start an "edit war" over this, but frankly, this range is excessively accurate, and was apparently just thrown around in the arsgladii forum. The date given by Hoffmann is "beginning of 16th century", which is at least adequately vague.

As for the watermark, I understand the 1504-1519 range is the known range of production of "Piccard Ochsenkopf V Nr 183". The general type of ox head watermark with a cross has a much wider range, beginning in the early 15th century. There are apparently scores of nearly identical watermarks, and you need to be an expert to tell one from another. If an expert in a scholarly publication claims "between 1504 and 1519" I am sure we should report that, but just because someone threw this around on a forum doesn't make it very conclusive.

My gut reaction to this is that of CH Tobler on the thread you have linked,

First, the handwriting looks very 15th c.; it has a lot in common with hands seen in the earlier 15th c. works, albeit a bit sloppier than most. Granted, I'm not an expert in that field, but it sure doesn't look like the 16th c. manuscripts I've seen; what few 16th c. works don't use a humanistic hand tend to have a script that's quite different looking. Particularly compelling is the large rubricated initial letter "I", the one that begins "In Sant Jorgen namen..."; this could almost be out of Hs. 3227a, which uses very similar initial capitals. [Alas, I can't spot any watermarks in 3227a...does anyone know if there are any?] Beyond that, the link seems to imply this conclusion of a later date is based on the watermark. If so, that's strange - the 'Ringeck' manuscript has a variation of the bull's head w/cross watermark seen all over 15th century manuscripts (including the Thott Talhoffer). From what I've read, this paper was Italian in origin, often of high quality. All references I've come across put the bull's head squarely in the 15th century. If anything, the particular bull mark in Ringeck looks like an earlier, perhaps cruder, variant.

Tobler later gets support from Keith Alderson,

As someone who has tried to date things based on watermarks (I found 8 examples of my own efforts last night) - this is a very difficult thing to do with certainty for a whole variety of reasons. Most of the watermarks I have examined in a transmission from 1449 to 1547 are ‘Ox Head’ – using Piccard didn’t help much and I have personally abandoned this as my basis for dating things – too many unknowns (how long was the paper stock on hand, when is the earliest work with which we can associate this mark and on and on and on). Anyone who tells you that watermarks are gospel is not well informed. I did also focus on your comment about the rubricated initials and spent some hours looking at a variety of 'I's' in 15th century works (specifically one 1449 Frankish ms. and two 1476 Swabian “humanist” manuscripts). Of course this too is not definitive, but the 'I' in Ringeck looks to be completely in line with mid 15th century examples and not at all very much different from 3227a. The form of letters, especially those of the Briefmaler's art (who did the rubrics most often) tend to be long lived and so cover a hundred years or more of use. Looking at capital and lowercase 'D's' I feel that Ringeck isn't as old as 3227a - but neither is it true 'Humanist script' as we would find in the 16th century. Also the habit of ‘rubricating’ things isn’t really as popular in the mid 1500’s, much more a scribal tradition of earlier times (IMO).

In sum, Ringeck looks and feels and reads like a mid 15th century work (plus or minus 25 years?)

So yes, we should note that Hoffmann wants to place this "at the beginning of the 16th century", but we shold not present this as if it was the last word, let alone getting stuck with the "1504-1519" range which somebody dropped in some forum.

The text of this manuscript certainly dates to around the mid 15th century. The ms itself may perhaps be a copy made a few decades later, who knows. But this entire watermark thing so far seems to be rather far from settled. --Dieter Bachmann 14:22, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

That's fair. The limit to my caring in this very low, and my main reason for not wanting to make small changes like 1504-1519 vs. early 1500s is that most of these pages also list that date and will likewise need to be updated. But the primary reason I reverted the last edits is that I didn't have time to fix the formatting--Semantic MediaWiki only accepts certain sorts of information for specific attributes, and in the case of dating it must be a number. By changing it to "early 16th century" and removing the semantic date tag, you effectively removed it from the manual index--those indexes are generated by the semantic engine and only list articles in Category:Manuals which have the attribute it's sorting for (dates in this case). I've just changed it to "early 1500s", but I'll have to worry about updating the other pages later.

~ Michael Chidester ^(Contact) 17:48, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I see you are using some pretty advanced wikimagic here. I will take care not to break this in the future. On the content side, it appears from a neutral perspective (which you will take if your 'limit to caring' is low) we will need to say the ms. has been dated to anywhere between 1440 and 1520, without giving any preference to early vs. late dates in this range. --Dieter Bachmann 08:10, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

I will also need to retract the "dropped on some forum" comment on the 1504-1519 range, as I just figured out where it came from. Hoffmann gives this as his range for the watermark here. --Dieter Bachmann 08:14, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Semantic MediaWiki is pretty cool. It should also allow a search interface like this one, if my technical admins ever get around to building it. Your history of dating the ms. is good, I'm going to restructure it and move most of it above the fold. I realize that it's not how Wikimedia sites do it, but on this wiki I try to put all miscellaneous information in the first section, and keep the rest of each article carefully structured. Cheers.

~ Michael Chidester ^(Contact) 15:37, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Alzo, I should point out that the Additional Resources section is strictly for printed works that can supplement the resources in the article (generally either a translation or biographical work). Electronic resources either go in the source table on the talk page (if they contain a translation, transcription, or image that we've used), the "bottom" field of the infobox (if they contain a translation in a foreign language), or in the footnotes (if they contain useful information that was used in writing the article). This is to avoid the "link inflation" that I often see in HEMA articles on Wikipedia, where everyone seems to want to make themselves feel important by sticking a link to some article they wrote once with no useful information or to their own little club because they happen to have studied the treatise in question. We eliminated all external links sections in our articles early on, because if a link is useful to our readers it will appear somewhere else.

The only reason I bring it up is to point out that the link to manuscripta-mediaevalia.de will have to be moved into footnotes. At some point I need to write a Wiktenauer style guide so that these conventions are obvious, but at the moment our design is still evolving so it's a bit premature. Cheers.

~ Michael Chidester ^(Contact) 19:54, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

The information about dating Ringeck's life (and Ringeck's Albrecht) is already in Ringeck's bio so I've removed it here.

~ Michael Chidester ^(Contact) 21:32, 7 July 2012 (UTC)