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
Similar Books
A Collaborative Tapestry in Honour of Shirley Ann Brown / Une fresque brodée en l’honneur de Shirley Ann Brown
The Bayeux Tapestry Seen by her Colleagues and Friends / La Tapisserie de Bayeux vue par ses collègues et amis
Balthasar Caymox of Nuremberg
Early Modern German Print Publishers: Popular Prints of the Seventeenth Century
Behind the Scenes of Medieval Roofs
An Overview of the Roofing Systems of Italian Churches
Volume 90
Beyond Sovereign Courts
Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy
Volume 3
Circulation, Use, Impact
The Consumption of Architectural Books in the Early Modern Eastern Adriatic
Volume 1
Councils, Conflicts, Correspondence
Urban Diplomacy in Reval (Tallinn) and Lübeck (c. 1470–1570)
Volume 67
Innovation and Medieval Communities
The Circulation of Ideas and Practices in and out of the Town (1200-1500)
Volume 63
Innovationes Lovanienses: Arts, Law and Theology at the University of Louvain (1425–1797)
Studium Lovaniense: Learning across Borders, 2
Volume 18
John Dunstaple Reading Boethius
John Dunstaple’s Annotations to Boethius’s “De institutione musica” in the Manuscript Oxford, Corpus Christi College Library, MS 118
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
Linguistic and Cultural Dynamics in a Frontier Society
New Perspectives on Northeastern Bavaria and Western Bohemia in the Early Middle Ages
Volume 9
Medieval Debates on Foreknowledge: Future Contingents, Prophecy, and Divination
Acts of the XXVII Annual Colloquium of the SIEPM, Trento 12-15 September 2023
Volume 31
Medieval Yeghegis, Armenia
History, Archaeology, Society. Local Multiplicities and Global Connections of a Rural Centre on the Silk Road(s)
Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel
Style Options, Artistic Rivalry and Self Fashioning in Neapolitan Baroque Painting / Plurale Stilbildung, Kunstlerkonkurrenz und Self Fashioning in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei
