The Hand to the Sword Like the Mind to the Word: Learning Embodied Knowledge from Late Medieval Fight Books
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Embodied knowledge is a rising concept in many fields of knowledge, and it is crucial to the field of educational sciences. This article aims to contribute to its historicization by examining the case of fight books. It takes its starting point in the coincidence suggested by Pamela Smith, between today’s notion of embodied knowledge and the pre-modern notion of art. While Smith focused on the productive arts, it is important to recognize that the pre-modern notion of art encompasses a broad spectrum, beyond craft. As such it includes fencing and the arts of combat. The article will take as case studies the three oldest known European fight books: The Liber de Arte Dimicatoria (Leeds, Royal Armouries, MS I.33); Fiore de’i Liberi’s Fior di Battaglia, and the manuscript Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Cod. Hs. 3227a. The following question will guide the inquiry: What are the specific means by which Late medieval fencing, as embodied knowledge, is communicated through books? Keywords: Cod. Hs. 3227a, embodied knowledge, fencing, Fiore de’i Liberi, late medieval, MS I.33
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".