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De Re Militari | Book Reviews

J. Wilkinson-Latham

Discovering Edged Weapons

Oxford: Shire Publications, 2009 [original 1972]. 64 pp. £4.99/$11.95. ISBN 978-0852631386.

It is nearly impossible for studies of medieval military history not to encounter mention or lengthier discussion of one of the primary contemporary weapons, the sword. Indeed, the sword itself has been the topic for studies as diverse as Ewart Oakeshott's typography studies and, more recently, Kelly Devries' examinations of medieval military technology. Edged weapons have long captured the interest and imagination of serious scholars, collectors, antiquarians, and the casual military or history buff, in part because of their centrality to world cultures for millennia, and in part because of their tangible nature. In 1972, Wilkinson-Latham published a short book on edged weapons, which now has been reprinted by Shire Books. Wilkinson-Lathan's book nominally covers a huge topic at an exceedingly introductory level; in a brief sixty-four pages, the author has attempted to trace the development, forms and use, and even at times the creation of edged weapons from the stone age through the ceremonial and presentation swords of recent times. What is not discussed is any sort of contextualization; the "how's" and "why's" of these weapons in their respective cultural, societal, economic, and political contexts is completely absent, as is the significance or utility these weapons had even in the more limited arena of war. The author undoubtedly is skilled at describing the physical properties of edged weapons and how they were wielded—indeed there are even discussions about certain of these weapons' manufacture—but the role these weapons actually played in the context of war remains for the reader to extrapolate.

Wilkinson-Lathan has divided the short book into eight chapters, the first four of which are chronological investigations of the evolution of different types of edged weapons, such as axes, swords and lances. The author is obviously much more well-versed with and comfortable discussing modern periods, such as the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries; chapter four, entitled "The Era of Regulation Military Weapons," is the only one that incorporates details that place edged weapons into their larger context of war, and discusses reasons that dictated the development and changing forms of such weapons during that period. The remaining chapters cover topics such as non-Western edged weapons, identifying marks of sword-makers, and tips for the weapons collector. In terms of the weight placed on information concerning educated collecting of weapons, as well as the lack of any scholarly apparatus, such as notes, citations and a bibliography, this book plainly is designed to appeal most to the collector rather than the scholar.

Dotted throughout the book are line drawings of different sorts of edged weapons, which provide a helpful visual complement to the written description of the weapons, clearly illustrating the distinctions between various types. For example, figure 5 displays six examples of  medieval staff weapons, showing the variety of head shapes.(15) Even though the image is well labeled, the author has also referred to the individual sub-images in his text so that the reader absolutely understands what is being described. Another effective figure demonstrates the components of a typical Japanese sword blade. (50) In addition to his line drawing figures, Wilkinson-Lathan has also included sixteen pages of black and white photographs of swords, bayonets, and other edged weapons dating from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. (33-48) Although these images are only briefly mentioned (as plates) but not discussed or explored further in the text, they do offer another method for visualizing the physical appearance of the weapons described in the book.

The book ends abruptly without any sort of conclusion, as is suitable for a guidebook rather than a more academic work. Wilkinson-Lathan's book is simply a manual for those interested in understanding the world of weapons from a collector's perspective. The book's cover description itself specifies that "prominence is given to those weapons that are most likely to be encountered in antique shops of even in the attic," implying that the book's goal is to help collectors to identify and recognize collectables when they are found. For the scholar, therefore, this book will be of fairly little use, and, as military history of all periods and geographic regions continues to attract a growing number of experts, the corpus of more valuable texts likewise continues to increase.

Ilana Krug

York College of Pennsylvania <[email protected]>

Page Added: November 2010