Meyer's Art of Fencing
Renaissance German fencing based on Joachim Meyer's printed 1570 manual, today one of the most widely practiced branches of HEMA.
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About Meyer's Art of Fencing
Joachim Meyer (c. 1537, Basel – 24 February 1571, Schwerin) was a cutler and professional fencer, a so-called Freifechter, whose work brings the classical era of German fencing to a close. In Strasbourg he gained citizen's rights in 1560 by marrying a widow, and earned his living partly by running fencing schools. In 1570 he published the Gründtliche Beschreibung der Kunst des Fechtens, an extensive printed manual with rich engravings that differs from the older manuscripts chiefly in its purpose: it does not aim to be a set of notes for initiates, but a continuous textbook for someone learning from scratch. The book has five sections organized by weapon — longsword, dusack, rapier, dagger combined with wrestling, and polearms, meaning staff, halberd and pike. Meyer explicitly aligns himself with the Liechtenauer tradition and adopts its terminology, yet reworks it for circumstances in which a fight to the death had become a practice and competitive bout within schools. This is the source of his emphasis on bodywork: stances, transitions, judging distance, and drilling in continuous sequences that can be repeated. Precisely because he describes what other masters took for granted, his section on the longsword ranks among the most detailed surviving sources on this weapon at all. Meyer died shortly after the book's publication at about thirty-three years of age, having entered the service of the Duke of Mecklenburg in Schwerin. In today's HEMA his system is one of the most widely practiced branches and, for many groups, serves as the entry point into the entire German school.
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