Greetings all!
It’s the holiday season here in the USA and this Thursday is Thanksgiving. Our national day of thanks and getting together with friends and family. This year, we martial artists have something to be very thankful for! The text of “Martial Culture and Historical Martial Arts in Europe and Asia” is a new scholarly work comparing the martial traditions of Europe and Asia. Created in cooperation with authors from China and around the world, the text represents the work that has been done between schools in both Italy and China. And it is now available in English, FOR FREE!
Those who have been following us will find this very interesting, I expect, as the meeting of western and eastern martial art has been one of our primary endeavors from our inception. Here is what the publisher blurb says:
This open access book is the first publication to provide a comparative framework for the study of martial culture and historical martial arts in Europe and Asia, in particular in Italy and China. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of martial studies, contributors to this volume include historians, archeologists, art historians, scholars of fencing literature, metallurgists, as well as contemporary master swordsmiths and masters-of-arms in historical martial arts. Assembling researchers from these diverse fields, this book offers a multi-perspectival and dynamic view of martial culture across time and space.The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary significance of this book cannot be overemphasized. Whereas a number of contributors are internationally recognized and, indeed, leading authorities in their respective fields; for example, Jeffrey Shaw has been a world-leading new media artist and scholar since the 1970s, while Ma Mingda is a well-known historian and the contemporary founder of Chinese martial studies; and while there are significant overlaps in their research interests, this book brings their research within a single volume for the first time. Equally significant, the book is structured in such a way to reflect the various core aspects of martial studies, particularly in relation to the study of historic sword culture, including history, culture, philosophy, literature and knowledge transmission, material culture, as well as the technical aspects of historical fencing. As one of the first titles on martial studies, this book becomes a reference not only for scholars taking an interest in this subject, but also for historians; scholars with interest in Chinese and/or Italian history (particularly of the Medieval or early modern periods), the history of international relations in Asia / Far East; anthropologists; scholars of martial (arts) studies and researchers in sword-making and/or historic metallurgy.
From about this Book- https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-19-2037-0#toc
So, please check it out! A rare publication in English from professor Ma should not be missed. I will do a review in the future. But for now, Happy reading!
Full text here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EH_S3ANjuc8CtAx_pIAxZFVyVidrjOMk/view?fbclid=IwAR2PJvI7dE9K712MpKzR117HTg4c1P061xSN3fPaWkzbXfaChFvncObzthM
Terra Prime Fighting Words 
Wow.. Very, very cool
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