Customer Reviews

The Art of Combat: A German Martial Arts Treatise of 1570

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This translation is far from perfect, but it's a must for students of the renaissance martial arts. The frustrating flaws with this presentation are that everything is translated, including terms for specific movements and techniques. Students who are used to using the original, specific German terms for certain techniques will be thrown off by the variable, hard to catch, less specific English terms and phrases they are replaced with.

It would have been far better if they could have left technique names and terms in the original language, perhaps italicised, and defined elsewhere in the book or in margins.

Also, the pictures for each section are clustered in the end of each chapter, making one flip back and forth constantly in study.

Aside from all that, the book is one of the best out there. Published in the late prime of true renaissance martial arts culture, many mistake it for a "sportified" version of earlier combative arts. In reality, it is simply presented in more of an established, martial arts school type format, giving yet more perspective on techniques of the same, old tradition. It has quite a variety of weapons, training drills and methods, and principles expounded upon withing it's covers.

This book can be very confusing to read, but then again it was written in the 1500s in German and was recently translated. If you are into historic combat arts, it is very good. It begins with longsword techniqus, then transfers them to dusak (precursor to German Sabre) techniques, then translates them to rapier techniques. If you're only interested in rapier, then you may look elsewhere, because the rapier part only make sense if you've studied the dusak part, which only makes sense if you've studied the longsword part.

I've found it not too difficult to follow, especially with the woodcuts included with the text.