Catharina and Elgiva

Thank you for your interest, ladies I would like to let you know that complements will get you every where.

I completely agree with your statements. I’ve always read that knights where trained since childhood to be warriors. But that would normally be followed with fighting was a brutal skilless affair relying on brute strength. To me this has always seemed contradictory at best. All thou I may be wrong but for some reason but I suspect that I.33 may have been intended for non-nobles. The other surviving fechtbuchs (German for fightbook) seem to be intended for training in dueling or judicial duels between nobles. Or at least that is the consensus of most scholars on this subject that I know of.

there are two surviving traditions of martial arts that we know about from the medieval period. The Italian and German traditions, well there are also are 2 incomplete English manuals, a Portuguese manual on jousting and a French one on Poleaxes dating to around 1400ad. Unfortunately the English, Portuguese and French books are very incomplete giving us only a shadow of what these regional martial arts systems may have been like. For instance the French manuscript is only around 10-15 pages of what must have been 30-40. The English ones seem to be notes taken during a class by a student. And the Portuguese one only covers martial arts as relating to cavalry and horsemanship (the writer died of plague before completing it). The Italian system was compiled by Fiore Dei Liberi who wrote a book named "Flower of Battle" in 1410. It is one of the few “complete” systems surviving. One of the interesting things that strikes me are the similarities between Fiore's wresting and Japanese aikido and judo. Both developed in isolation of each other with out knowledge of the other. Unfortunately I know very little about the Italian tradition and system. I currently study the German Tradition.

Some web sites on Fiore Dei Liberi and his system. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiore_dei_Liberi

www.aemma.org/onlineResources/liberi/contents_body.htm

www.the-exiles.org/FioreProject/Project.htm

www.the-exiles.org.uk/fioreproject

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fechtbuch

I am not going to go into detail about the German tradition as I have already done so on AW . But I will give you these links www.thearma.org/temp/Fight-Earnestly.pdf it is for a pdf copy and commentary on a manuscript written by a Hans Talhoffer written around the middle of the 15 th century. Hans was one of the great masters and documenters with in the Liechtenauer/German tradition. www.schielhau.org/von.danzig.html Peter von Danzig's Fechtbuch (MS 1449), and a A Facsimile of Meyer's Fechtbuch 1600 Edition www.higginssword.org/guild/study/manuals/meyer/index.html or www.freifechter.de/cgi-bin/cowman/content/fechtbuecher/meyer/meyer a transcript and an English translation www.schielhau.org/Meyer.title.html