The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe

Mounted encounters by armored knights locked in desperate hand-to-hand combat, stabbing and wrestling in tavern brawls, deceits and brutalities in street affrays, balletic homicide at the dueling field―these were the martial arts of Renaissance Europe. In this extensively illustrated book Sydney Anglo, a leading historian of the Renaissance and its symbolism, provides the first complete study of the martial arts from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth century. He explains the significance of martial arts in Renaissance education and on a regular basis life and offers a full account of the social implications of one-to-one combat training.

Like the martial arts of Eastern societies, ritualized combat in the West was once linked to up to date social and scientific concerns, Anglo shows. All over the Renaissance, physical exercise was once considered central to the education of knights and gentlemen. Soldiers wielded plenty of weapons at the battlefield, and it was once normal for civilians to carry swords and understand how to make use of them. In schools across the continent, professional masters-of-arms taught the skills necessary to live to tell the tale in a society where violence was once endemic and life cheap. Anglo draws on a wealth of evidence―from detailed treatises and sketches by jobbing artists to magnificent images by Dürer and Cranach and descriptions of real combat, weapons and armor―to reconstruct and illustrate the arts taught by these ancient masters-at-arms.