Paulus Hector Mair’s Ars Athletica Volume 2
Dusack
by Paulus Hector Mair, edited by Jeffrey L. Forgeng
To those who study the physical culture of arms in medieval Europe, the German Fechtbucher – treatises on combat arts – are among the most important surviving documentary sources: no other region in Europe produced such an extensive body of writings on the techniques of medieval combat. Among these, and indeed among the martial-arts treatises produced by any culture, the massive compendia commissioned by the scholar-swordsman Paulus Hector Mair (1517-1579) stands out as uniquely ambitious and monumental. The text survives in three manuscript copies, each consisting of two volumes, with each manuscript running to approximately 1200 pages, and includes about 17 weapon-forms (depending on how one counts them) from two-handed sword to rapier, armoured combat to sickle and scythe; each form consists of anywhere from 8 to 136 lavishly illustrated techniques, in many cases followed by one or more seminal texts on the form. The various weapon-forms are mutually integrated with each other in techniques and vocabulary, and collectively offer an enormous volume of interpretable material. The combination of text and image in the illustrated techniques offers obvious advantages to the understanding of a physical practice, and Mair is unique among the German masters in systematically giving instructions to both combatants, so that as one learns how to perform a technique, they also learn how to counter it. Lastly, one of the most important features of the Ars Athletica is the Latin translation, which serves as something of a Rosetta stone for interpreting the vocabulary of these long-lost martial arts. In this series, Dr. Jeffrey Forgeng, translator of the equally seminal Fechtbucher of Joachim Meyer and Hans Leckuchner has compiled a team of translator-practitioners to tackle Mairs opus. Over a decade of work has gone into transcribing, translating and annotating the Ars Athletica (Treatise on the Martial Arts) presenting both the original German and Latin, as well as a modern English translation. Volume Two of this series presents the Dusack, a sporting version of the older Langesmesser (long-knife) a single-edged utility sword characteristic of the German-speaking areas of Europe. Made sometimes of wood, sometimes of leather, occasionally of steel, the Dusack was the training weapon for all single-handed swords. Mairs 44 Dusack sequences contained herein represent one of the earliest surviving treatises on this weapon: previous texts tend to focus on the Messer, and readers will find Mair ends this section by including his own redaction and treatment of some of the most famous Messer texts of the previous century.
- By (author) Paulus Hector Mair
- Edited by Jeffrey L. Forgeng
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