Codex Lew (Cod.I.6.4º.3)

Codex Lew is a German fencing and wrestling manuscript from around the sixties of the 15th century, held in the Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg under the shelfmark Cod.I.6.4º.3. It is an anonymous compilation of texts by several masters of the Liechtenauer tradition. We have not been able to establish the scribe, the compiler or the person who commissioned it. It has 125 paper folios measuring 140 × 175 mm, written in black and red ink. It opens with a gloss on Liechtenauer's verses on the long sword (folios 1r–53v). Next come texts on the short sword linked to the names of Martin Huntsfeld and Andre Lignitzer, Lignitzer's sword and buckler, and Otto Jud's wrestling (85r–94v). Folios 95r–123r hold a gloss on the verses on mounted fencing, closed by a colophon bearing the name Lew. The Augsburg manuscript is the oldest attested witness of branch A of the Pseudo-Peter von Danzig gloss family, which also includes Codex Danzig. This branch, sometimes called the Lew gloss, glosses only the long sword and mounted fencing, and texts by Lignitzer and Huntsfeld replace the short sword in it. The other main witness is the independently copied Codex Speyer from Salzburg, dated 1491. Branch A was later reworked by Paulus Hector Mair, Lienhart Sollinger and Joachim Meyer. Until the tens of the 21st century, researchers mostly considered the Lew gloss an inferior copy and neglected it. The first transcription of any of its copies appeared in 2001, based on the Augsburg version. In 2017 the publisher VS-Books issued the book Jude Lew: Das Fechtbuch, in a German version translated by Dierk Hagedorn and an English one translated by Falk Fritz and Thomas Rhem.

Martial arts in this work

Authorship

The manuscript bears Lew's name more by convention. Lew is often wrongly given as the author of the whole codex, but his name is tied only to two parts, the glosses on the long sword and on mounted fencing. The colophon on folio 123r says that here ends the Jewish art of the man called Lew, and together with the mounted-fencing gloss it was also copied into the Graz and Munich versions. According to Wiktenauer it can also be read to mean that Lew was the scribe or commissioner of the whole manuscript. The name Lewe means lion and may have been a nickname. The form Jud Lew or Jude Lew does not occur in period sources, and Wiktenauer calls it modern. The question of authorship was addressed by Daniel Jaquet and Bartłomiej Walczak in Acta Periodica Duellatorum (2014). The title page mentions, among other things, Lew's fencing in armour. However, Wiktenauer attributes the treatise on fencing in armour ascribed to Lew to Martin Huntsfeld, and it marks the passage on folios 54r–70v inconsistently.

Editions and translations

The Augsburg version was described in their inventories by Wierschin (1965) and Hils (1985). The first transcription of any copy of the Lew gloss was published in 2001 on the ARMA-Pl website by Grzegorz Żabiński (long sword) and Monika Maziarz (mounted fencing), both based on the Augsburg version. A web transcription by Dierk Hagedorn followed in 2008. A French translation of the mounted fencing based on the Augsburg and Salzburg versions was published by Michaël Huber in 2004, the long sword was added in 2010, and a Spanish translation by Eugenio García-Salmones came in 2011. The first public English translation of the Lew gloss from all available versions was prepared by Cory Winslow in 2016. The first printed edition is Jude Lew: Das Fechtbuch (VS-Books, 2017). In 2020 Stephen Cheney self-published a translation of the long sword, Ringeck·Danzig·Lew Longsword. We did not find a facsimile in the sources. Images of the manuscript were made available by the Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg as public domain.

People and martial arts

• Johannes LiechtenauerCo-author
• Martin HuntsfeldCo-author
• Andreas LiegnitzerCo-author
• Ott JudCo-author
• LewCo-author
• Dierk HagedornEditor
• Falko FritzTranslator
• Thomas RhemTranslator

Details

Form

Manuscript

Repository

Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg

Shelfmark

Cod.I.6.4º.3

Folios

125

Material

Paper

Library digitisation

nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:384-uba003098-9

Editions

• 2004 · FR · ARDAMHE · translation
• 2010 · FR · ARDAMHE · translation
• 2011 · ES · AVEH · translation
• 2016 · EN · Wiktenauer · translation
• 2017 · DE · Jude Lew: Das Fechtbuch · VS-Books · first edition
• 2017 · EN · Jude Lew: Das Fechtbuch · VS-Books · translation
• 2020 · EN · Ringeck·Danzig·Lew Longsword · translation