![]() I have put a pdf of that book here for you to download for free: One of the most common difficulties readers face is the use of Italian terminology. If you bought this book thinking it was a state-of-the-art interpretation of Fiore dei Liberi’s longsword material, then I apologise for that, you need The Medieval Longsword. I hope you find this an engaging read – just please don’t take it as gospel! I have also included as an appendix an article I wrote in 2005 outlining the key changes that had been made to the way I was teaching, in just the first year that the book had been out. I have also corrected my unfathomably bad use of Italian terms (for some reason I had the names of the blows reversed: fendente mandritto, for instance, which should be, and now is, mandritto fendente). I have left the organisation of this book as it was, and simply excised the misleading terms, replacing them with “wide measure” and “close measure” instead. Giocco largo is better translated as “wide play”, giocco stretto as “constrained play”. I go into this at length in Mastering the Art of Arms, vol. Fiore organises his techniques according to the circumstances in which they should be done. ![]() The terms refer what you do in a specific tactical situation (of which measure is only a part), and especially to the relationship of the blades when they meet. There are several plays that don’t fit this theory, but most critically it overlooks the fundamental point of his book, which is not a catalogue, but the representation of a system. In other words, Fiore catalogued his longsword techniques by measure. ![]() I (and everyone else at the time) thought they indicated the distance at which techniques occurred. I could not resist correcting the single most egregious and pervasive misinterpretation in the book, which was my use of the Italian terms giocco largo and giocco stretto. To that end I have made relatively few changes in this second edition, just correcting a few typos, excising a few unfortunate remarks, and footnoting the most outstanding errors. But I think this book is still useful, in that it contains the essence of why we should follow the art, and it offers a window into what was considered state-of-the-art only a decade or so ago. There was no point in trying to update this book – just about everything would have had to be changed. My understanding of the historical material reached the point where it was ready to be written down in full in about 2010, and it has been published as the three-volume Mastering the Art of Arms series. My inbox full of emails from people from all over the world telling me how much my book has helped them suggests that it did its job. This was supposed to keep everyone busy while I got on with figuring out the sources. ![]() But there seemed to me to be a need for a basic primer in the use of a longsword, so that people who wanted to take up the practice of the art could do so in a useful and systematic way. I knew full well that I as an instructor, and we as a community, had not even begun to understand the depths of these arts. I wrote this book at a time when my research into our medieval combat heritage was at a very basic level. In 2012 the copyright reverted to me in its entirety, so I was free to make the book widely available at a reasonable price. This was a silly price to pay for a book that, from a practical point of view, was already thoroughly out of date. ![]() By 2007 it was out of print, though still in demand, with second-hand copies fetching sums in the hundreds of dollars. The Swordsman’s Companion put my school on the map, and brought my work to the attention of several thousand enthusiasts worldwide. In 2004 I had a book published that changed my life. A Modern Training Manual for Medieval Longswordĭesign by Zebedee Design & Typesetting Services ![]()
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