I'm really curious about how melee fighting was handled in any of these situations, especially since renaissance pikemen didn't have shields like hellenic troops, which would suggest that this combat devolved into two growing piles of corpses.
You might be interested in a past post on the topic:
thanks for that, it's certainly enlightening and a good read. Mostly what concerns me though is the individual combat between the foot soldiers. Going into melee, as it were.
One thing I was reading about had mention of the swedish pike tactics, which called for "Infantry to charge, and engage the enemy infantry in hand to hand combat" after several successive vollies of shot.
This, however, brings up the idea of infantrymen charging, with no shield, into a pike block, which sounds like certain death -for both sides, if they all have pikes.