Reddit reviews The Dueling Sword

Well, sort of. What you're describing is foil. A couple of very good books on early epee fencing are:

The Dueling Sword by Claude la Marche

Secrets of the Sword by Baron de Bazancourt

They're both very readable, and give a good picture of teaching someone who may or may not know some of the foil you describe above to use an epee in a real fight.

What Bazancourt and la Marche describe sounds like epee to me. La Marche in particular sounds like a modern epee coach, in a book written in the late 19th century about a sport that was just being invented. Amazing stuff. There's a good blurb from Gary Copeland on the back, that's actually what got me to read it, and I'm glad I did.

Epee was fencing. Full speed, what they call in the books "flying attacks", which means you don't put your foot down before you hit, no style points, much discussion of how anyone can beat anyone at one touch in epee, the sort of thing you'd hear if you went to a one-touch epee competition today. Be careful, cover your hand, don't make crazy deep attacks, all that stuff. It sounds nothing like today's classical fencers.

And neither writer was backwards-looking. They were both developing their sport/martial art. I can't imagine either one would be a "classical fencer" today, they'd be fencers, trying to get better.

Anyway, if you want to get past the history in the Cohen book, which is a decent start but not really comprehensive, those are two original sources you might look at.

> The reasoning behind your history of the Epee is conjecture, nothing more, and more than anything most likely represents what you wish were true.

There are actually written records from the late 19th century, you know. You should read this, or perhaps this.. First person accounts from people who were familiar with the epee du combat and the beginnings of sporting epee. Very readable, both of them. Seriously, I recommend them. Good books.
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> MMA moves do work in a real fight, whereas many of the fanciful whippy moves of modern fencing would not be useful with a real weapon.

Nobody is fighting with a real weapon. I mean, if you're into historical research, great. But training for a "real fight", whatever you envision that to be, is about as useful as training for a mammoth hunt. There are no mammoth hunts in 2016. You spend your whole life in your back yard shooting at mammoth targets and talking about what it would be like to track a mammoth and studying how you would butcher one and inventing recipes for mammoth meat. Only problem: there are no mammoth hunts in 2016. None. It's over. Why not do something else instead of spending your life pretending to be training for something you'll never do? Take up target shooting, or go deer hunting.
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> We are not talking about rules etc. to make the competition safer (no eye pokes), but the actual utility of the techniques.

Actually we are. Singlestick was abandoned because it was too dangerous when you got good at it. Too many broken hands and collarbones. Epees let you fence full speed in practice, which was considered good for the real thing of epee du combat (see La Marche on the "flying attack", which is an attack that lands when your foot is still in the air and you're still accelerating).
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> Keep on keeping on and pretend that whipping your sword so that it bends around and hits your opponent on his back is anything besides playing whiptag.

That's an extremely unusual action. It was not the point of epee when the flexibility levels were set, and it's not much seen even today.
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> Edit: Can't actually do the whip-over-the-back move with an Epee, but can with a foil.

It's possible to flick over the back with an epee, but you have to be brutally strong and have world class technique. It's not a usual action, and it's not very effective if you try it too often.

See Tagliariol's last touch against Jeannet in the Olympic gold medal bout in 2008, for example. He was showing off. Heinzer can also do it. But as I said, it's very unusual.

The primary purpose and effect of an epee's specified flexibility, which was set by rules long before the flick was invented, was and is to have the stiffest blade possible that still let people fence full speed, and thus to avoid calling stuff like this "free fencing." That's not anything. It's not a good sport, and it's not good preparation for a real fight with those weapons, if that's important to you, which honestly why would it be, but anyway.