Paulus Hector Mair’s Ars Athletica Volume III
Staff Weapons
By (author) Paulus Hector Mair Edited by Jeffrey L. Forgeng
Hardback (Published)
(April 2026)
ISBN: 9781937439774
8.5 x 11 inches
Price: $125.95
In stock
Volume III of this series presents 108 training techniques with a wide variety of staff weapons, including simple staves of varying lengths (including the only pre-modern material for a walking-stick-length staff), the spear and pike, the soldier’s halberd and the knightly pollaxe. Also included are a series of techniques involving mixed weapons.
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 compendium 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, armored 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 Mair’s opus. Over a decade of work has gone into transcribing, translating and annotating the Ars Athletica, presenting both the original German and Latin, as well as a modern English translation.
Volume III of this series presents 108 training techniques with a wide variety of staff weapons, including simple staves of varying lengths (including the only pre-modern material for a walking-stick-length staff), the spear and pike, the soldier’s halberd and the knightly pollaxe. Also included are a series of techniques involving mixed weapons: spear against axe, sword against spear, even dusak against halberd, making this the most diverse series of instructions for using long weapons in the known corpus of European fencing manuscripts.
- By (author) Paulus Hector Mair
- Edited by Jeffrey L. Forgeng
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